I'm saying the omission of the disclosure of an obvious conflict is a bad lapse. It's bad whether it results in bias or not and independent of what I think. The OG commenter was right to point it out and you're not right to suggest it only counts if there is evidence of bias.
For any journal, compliance is not the goal, the goal is the have high quality, impactful papers. If you care about compliance more than the paper, then sure, so be it, but its not a conversation I'm particularly interested in.
This isn't about 'compliance'. It's fine if you didn't know about the practice and its purpose but that's neither my fault nor a reason to misrepresent what wrote.
