This is an appeal to authority and regardless, if you pass off something as proven fact you should have to be damned sure. Being wrong and claiming later that it’s a coding error should not cut it. This should result in a total loss of credibility
To be clear: it is an embarrassing error. Everyone also thinks this. They have been dragged for it quite a bit. But it was not deliberate.
In terms of the “total loss of credibility” … the fraction of empirical papers with some coding error approaches 1. The question is how bad it is.