I still think we need better ways of properly measuring this "brittleness". And also long term velocity and feature flexibility and other factors that are sacrificed when accumulating tech debt. Often these things are so vague that it really just comes down to a 1-vs-1 between the manager (who wants the feature out now) and the engineer (who may have been drinking too much microservices kool-aid). "I could have built this faster if we had switched to React last year" ok but roughly how much faster? Better measurements can make these discussions more objective, just like how scientific studies and data analysis are used in real politics.
Of course we can't ignore the glaring issue with this paper specifically and it's relationship with Codescene, but I do wish to see more studies in this direction.