In the most 2016 update the relative says it's common to see weird effects from the spools. If it's so common it should be reproducible I would think, yet I've never seen it done.
My guess is that this happens in nearly all large-scale production systems but goes mostly unobserved.
Not unobserved. Unremarked maybe? It's expected behavior that leads us into personification of systems e.g. calling ships 'she' or talking about temperament between similar machines on a line.
It would be much more convincing if there were more cases that weren't economically significant. A strange property of chemistry that only comes up when money and lawyers are involved seems inherently suspicious.
There really is a peer-reviewed paper saying that there are five crystalline forms of the stuff. ("Elucidation of crystal form diversity of the HIV protease inhibitor ritonavir by high-throughput crystallization", Applied Physical Sciences, Feb 2003).
It really does seem that in 1998 the more stable Form II suddenly started coming out of the factory, with lower solubility and such bad oral bioavailability that the oral capsules were withdrawn from the market until Abbott figured out a new way to make the drug. (I think they were already moving from a capsule to a gelcap and the gelcap didn't have the same issue? Just reading … this is not such a good source perhaps but lovely bare HTML: https://www.natap.org/1998/norvirupdate.html )
You're pretty unlikely to get academic papers when the required setup involves having 100M+ clients geographically dispersed. And it's going to be very hard for peers to reproduce your findings.
-- [0] - Which was well-known around the time of that event, and at its peak of popularity when the report in the article was filed!
As a side note, always test any global-scale torrent system for package distribution carefully, as sometimes the code can have "accidentally n**2" network usage that only shows up when you have a worldwide grid of clusters.
I don't recall what that means.