Papers which get accepted with honors are not necessarily more truthful than papers which have been rejected. Yann LeCunn goes on twitter like any other grad student around NeurIPS or ICML/ICMR and bitterly complains when one of his (many) papers is rejected. Whose more likely to be correct here? Yann LeCunn (the TOP nlp scholar in our field by citations, who does claim that most emergent capabilities are real in other papers), or a NeurIPS best paper winner? My bet is on Yann.

Also, consider that some work gets a lot of positivity not for the work itself, but for the people who wrote it. Timnit Gebaru's work was effectively ignored until she got famous for her spat with jeff dean at google. Her citations have exploded as a result, and I don't think that most in the field think that the "stochastic parrot" paper was especially good, and certainly not her other papers which include significant amounts of work dedicated to claiming that LLM training is really bad for the environment (despite a single jet taking AI researchers to conferences being worse for the environment than LLM training circa that paper being written was taking). Doesn't matter that the paper was wrong, it's now highly cited because you get brownie points for citing her work in grievance studies influenced subfields of AI.