Innovation can come from anywhere. Either we can take time to evaluate something on its merits (if you have the competency and resources), or leave it be (if you don't), or we accept to be told what is true by institutions with their own interests, who will use their position to further leverage them. And in this path, knowledge is no longer free.
I will read further, but this paper is attacking a real issue with neural nets.
Granted, it could also be that this was authored by people outside of the field who.sont know the rules, but given how much research gets published each day, it's impossible not to rely on heuristics, especially since this paper was.posted without context.
However, to me this appears to be serious work (whether or not it's remarkable). Crackpots often obscure their message, but here they state their premise quite clearly, and skimming through the arguments they seem sane and approachable.
I know this isn't the point you were going for, but this _is_ a heuristic that is deployed in some companies/institutions (at least the UK variant certainly is).
Which companies/institutions are you thinking of?
Hinton's paper in 2006 on reducing dimensionality with NNs appeared in Science and nobody paid attention to that either at the time.