The Sama-Bajau and all other modern humans have inherited maritime traditions that are tens of thousands of years old. They're not a good basis for comparison to the people we're discussing, just as you and I aren't.

We know very little about these people and their technology, but it's worth pointing out that this is the first definitively established oceanic crossing in human history. In fact, it's one of the few crossings we know about until many thousands of years later in the Holocene.

This is something that comes up regularly in these sorts of studies. There's a lot of ideas, skills, and technologies that look "easy" to us because we benefit from standing on the shoulders of giants, but are extremely difficult when you don't have that hindsight. It's entirely possible that this was a monumental feat to these people. It also might not have been, so I avoided describing it either way.