My take on that article was that it was identifying ways parents can better understand their children. I agree that the focus in the headline on reducing the chance of an autism diagnosis wasn’t great. Whoever chose that headline for the article emphasized the wrong outcome. For reference to anyone unfamiliar with this, it’s typically an editor and not the article’s author.

Mulling this over more, I understand why the study would be constructed on the singular outcome of measuring the impact on diagnosis rates since that is a commonly understood quantifiable metric.

I do appreciate that the study specifically calls out that diagnosis rate is not an ideal metric and that a more productive metric should be established. The scope of doing so would need be its own research and studies that identify these sorts of short comings are exactly how we surface these problems so that they can be picked up by other scientists.

Long comment, but reading through the article gave me encouraging bloomer vibes. I am having a good day though, so my perspective is of course influenced by that.