I think the author and you are using different meanings for "reasoning".

We do know that many people even in professional fields confuse correlation with causation. And even when that doesn't happen, when only doing measurments, correlation is often considered good enough without giving any thought to the underlying mechanism. This may be the root of Goodhart's law stating that when a measure becomes a target it stops being a good measure. The measure was only correlated with the behaviour the person doing the measuring thought was measuring.

Superstition is similar, but drops any shred of statistical rigour, relying on mere anecdotal evidence.