The article is not at all by the arXiv people. This is just a paper submitted to arXiv (about arXiv). The confusion is understandable, because the link is to ar

The article is not at all by the arXiv people. This is just a paper submitted to arXiv (about arXiv). The confusion is understandable, because the link is to arXiv's experimental HTML5 viewer, not the usual format (which would be: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07020 https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07020). The authors are from Authorea.com, a for-profit that wants to replace arXiv. Edit: Aside from that, fully agree with you. Good luck to them.