One of the benefits is it forces detractors to criticize the content instead of resorting to fallacious ad hominem attacks about the author's background and education.

I spot checked a few people in their media directory and this is most certainly false. Maybe around a third of people have bios that could imply they're "kids fresh out of the LSE" (even ignoring the LSE part).

What's surprising is how many people (seemingly) work there (hundreds!), for a publication that puts out like 70 articles per week? They got 9 people working on china and the china section only has 3-4 articles per week.