Not professional trolls, but experts in academic trolling.
Professional trolls make a living on trolling itself, these premiere experts in academic trolling have demonstrated a methodology for determining the willingness of the research community to endorse the truthfulness of deliberately-meaningless just-so nonsense and sweet nothings.
The bad-faith actors in this case are the publishers who claim to have read, understood, and verified articles which are little more than epistemological dogwhistle spaghetti.
The trolling was paying to publish nonsense papers in 0 impact score vanity rags and convincing people that implied something about the academic rigor of the fields themselves.
