Who Exactly Is a "Real Chemist"?

From where I've lived over the decades, a "real chemist" is somebody who gets their hands wet: natural product, synthetic, process or medicinal chemist trying to make white powders vs. brown oils. A computational chemist is often a synonym for somebody doing quantum chemistry while a molecular modeler is somebody doing computational medicinal chemistry. A theoretician, who could be doing QM method development or application sits somewhere on the spectrum between physics and chemistry but is often dismissed as "not a real chemist". AI applied to various pharmaceutical/biotech problems is probably going to end up like theoreticians.

Doesn't matter where they work, only what they do and possibly how they approach the problem. There's a set of titles appropriate for academia and one for industry, which aren't being discussed here.

The authors of the paper are most certainly fake chemists, the idpol-centered vocab gives it away.

Science is a social endeavour, identities as a scientist are relational. A chemist is someone whom the scientific community identifies as one, and it would certainly not call the authors on that paper chemists.