Indeed, which is why the title is so strange. Sauropods are a strange thing to compare with anyway, I would compare it with other methods actually used for working the land.
"As the total weight of modern harvesters is now approaching that of the largest animals that walked Earth, the sauropods, a paradox emerges of potential prehistoric subsoil compaction. We hypothesize that unconstrained roaming of sauropods would have had similar adverse effects on land productivity as modern farm vehicles, suggesting that ecological strategies for reducing subsoil compaction, including fixed foraging trails, must have guided these prehistoric giants."
Coming soon: Chris Pratt using a team of sauropods to farm in the next Jurassic Park movie.
If that's not in Randall Monroe's What If, I assume it must be in the upcoming sequel?
The Good Dinosaur (2015) - Argo and his family worked the farm like champs. No “T wrecks” there!
It would be fair to object that what was unsustainable by plants then might not be a problem for more modern plants, but I'm not sure what your comment about other methods aims at. The uncertainty comes from machines reaching previously unexplored weights, comparing with soil effects from lighter methods is unlikely to tell you if there's something bad coming.
Other methods are more applicable because we actually have data on what works and what doesn't with respect to soil loading, farmers really do not want to damage their land ('damage it in an hour, take a decade to recover') and have learned the hard way not to overload the soil already.
And secondly, 'sustainable' to a heart of wild beasts does not mean harvest every year - maybe the heard comes back in 20 years when soil has recovered.
Lastly, maybe they wheren't sustainable, after all they are extinct.
I mean, they existed for tens of millions of years (according to wikipedia), which is 1000's of times longer than the entirety of human farming; I think this easily classified as "sustainable".
Mass and ground loading is just one part of the picture. Roam area, root structure, etc make a difference.
If you can digest tree bark and have 5 square kilometers per person you can damage the soil as much as you want, something will still grow.
But if you want civilisation to survive, we need a regular harvest of 40 tons per hectare for potato, and if that number falls to 20 there is a famine.
You are the one advocating we live like Sauropods, so you should be telling us what was the roaming range of one - a male bobcat has roaming range of 20 to 70 sq. Kilometers
Also the weight over area might become less relevant the deeper you go because it naturally spreads outwards anyways.
That happened long ago that I don't think that you can state that with such certainty about the state of soil today. It makes zero sense. Sauropods lived at the latest 66 million years ago, and quite possibly longer. Unless there is some other link that the article tries to make but I've missed.