I think it is notable because he's an expert in that area and would know how to assess it. I'm not a fan of the tone either though...
But the authors claim "Hopular surpasses Gradient Boosting (e.g. XGBoost), Random Forests, and SVMs on tabular data." So if a simple sklearn model works better, it's worth knowing it might not be all it's cracked up to be before deciding to spend hours understanding another paper.
But the authors claim "Hopular surpasses Gradient Boosting (e.g. XGBoost), Random Forests, and SVMs on tabular data." So if a simple sklearn model works better, it's worth knowing it might not be all it's cracked up to be before deciding to spend hours understanding another paper.