Innovation can come from anywhere, but the authors of this paper chose to submit to a venue that is outside the focus of ML research. From what I understand, this paper would've been a great fit for COLT (or even a general/broad ML conference like ICML) and since it wasn't submitted (or wasn't accepted), i think it makes sense to assume that it was written by authors who either chose to circumvent the community, or were rejected by it. I don't find your comparison to ivy league fitting, because while there are still a significant number of great candidates from non ivy leagues, the number of great ML papers that have not been published at top tier ML venues is in the single digits -- most researchers I know would rather just upload their paper to arxiv and move on, rather than publishing in 2nd tier venues. Which should tell you how much of a bad signal the wrong venue can be in ML research.
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.