Google claims that their use of pretraining is a key requirement for being able to deliver a (slightly) better chip design. And they claim that a responding paper that did not attempt to do pretraining, should have been expected to be well below the state of the art in chip design.
Given how important reasoning is for chip design, and given how important pretraining is for driving reasoning in large language models, it is obvious that Google's reasoning is very reasonable. If Google barely beats the state of the art while using pretraining, an attempt that doesn't pretrain should be expected to be well below the current state of the art. And therefore that second attempt's poor performance says nothing about whether Google's results are plausible.