Yes, all "X is less than Y" statistics are meaningless unless there the convention you mention is strongly held by journalists when they interpret studies - whi

Yes, all "X is less than Y" statistics are meaningless unless there the convention you mention is strongly held by journalists when they interpret studies - which is unlikely. i.e. it'd be very easy for a study to say "we have shown that it's likely that the effect size is less than 1%" and then a journalist to interpret that as <1%, and then for a reader to incorrectly think "they wouldn't have said this if it were actually 0.1% or lower".