It's actually quite normal for experimental and observational subjects, which is the case for this one. I believe the record is set by one with over 5000 authors - see https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17567 for details.

For some subject areas, this is normal. Everyone who contributed something to the research gets credit. (I think in Physics the authors are listed alphabetically as well.)

Contrast that with other areas where people who contributed significant amounts of work towards research often get omitted from the work.

I note this from experience as a former academic and being close friends/family with academics.

I've been in ~10 authors papers. They were a collaboration of two ~5 persons groups of different universities. Each group has a different method tuned for a similar topic, and the idea was to use both of them together to get a better result.

And our project is a "software only" project. Other projects have to build an experimental device, babysit the device during the experiment, cleanup the noisy experimental data, and then try to reach conclusion, so it's natural to need more authors.

For some science fields it is totally normal to have so many people working on the same paper/project.

Seems to be common these days in astrophysics and particle physics, where you have many teams across multiple institutions collaborating on the research.