That rogue or freak waves exist has been known a long time, it is just that the standard theory could not explain them. Just look at a wave recording like this [1], one might assume this outlier is a measurement issue. When 99.999% of observations (I am guessing the number of nines, it may well be more) perfectly fits a statistical distribution (poisson or gaussian, I don't remember anymore), it is quite understandable that the extremely small number of outliers is discarded.
https://phys.org/news/2022-02-record-breaking-rogue-coast-va...