One of those topics where the meta is richer than the actual science. I remember my Dad mentioning as a child. The public interest is interesting in itself.

Not the the science isn't interesting. Population/behavioural studies like this are quite interesting. Animal behaviour is interesting, especially group behaviours where dynamics can play out.

That said, what was he actually trying to learn? If you take the same colony, and manually removed a few hundred juveniles every week... that's basically a mouse farm.

So, we know from both logic and evidence that "overpopulation" is a thing that occurs. Organisms multiply at exponential rates, and there must be hard limits on growth somewhere. Meanwhile, rodents as especially known for boom/bust cycles. Is it surprising that behaviour gets weird during "peak mouse" events? Mice aren't cannibalistic. The colony was protected from disease. Food didn't run out. Eventually, it's so crowded and everyone is stepping on one another. Breeding becomes unsuccessful, and that's the limiting factor.

What's the alternative, that the cube becomes literally full of mice before crashing? That mouse society adopts a super slow breeding rate to stabilize populations. What happened was, ultimately, a compromise between these two.

In any case, if the goal is analogy to humans... where's the work. If it's a scientific endeavour, how do we get from insights about mice to insights about people?