>>>On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits Qiushi Wu, and Kangjie Lu. To appear in Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland'21). Virtual conference, May 2021.
So answering that they hope to get more material for papers, which is the only goal of researchers (and their main KPI), is quite deeper an answer than the question required.
And for some insane reason, they decided to test if these kinds of bugs would be caught by inventing some and just submitting the patches, without informing anyone beforehand.
https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kjlu/papers/clarifications-hc....
Or to prove its overall insecurity.