These kinds of articles make you feel like there are specific, actionable problems that just need an adjustment and then they disappear. However, the system is much worse than you'd expect. Studies like this are extremely valuable, but they don't address the systematic problems affecting all signaling channels: most signals themselves have been manufactured into a product.

Build a SaaS and you'll have "journalists" asking if they can include you in their new "Top [your category] Apps in [current year]", you just have to pay $5k for first place, $3k for second, and so on (with a promotional discount for first place, since it's your first interaction).

You'll get "promoters" offering to grow your social media following, which is one reason companies may not even realize that some of their own top accounts and GitHub stars are mostly bots.

You'll get "talent scouts" claiming they can find you experts exactly in your niche, but in practice they just scrape and spam profiles with matching keywords on platforms like LinkedIn once you show interest, while simultaneously telling candidates that they work with companies that want them.

And in hiring, you'll see candidates sitting in interview farms quite clearly in East Asia, connecting through Washington D.C. IPs, present themselves with generic European names, with synthetic camera backgrounds, who somehow ace every question, and list experience with every technology you mention in the job post in their CVs already (not hyperbole, I've seen exactly this happen).

If a metric or signal matters, there is already an ecosystem built to fake it, and faking it starts to be operational and just another part of doing business.