Yeah, it feels like it's a preliminary piece of work towards a larger project. Maybe there's a COVID-19 factor and they had to cut down the scope at the last minute or something. Or the press office was breathing down their necks for something with media appeal. Or, in the style of my disastrous undergrad project, they grossly underestimated the amount of time it would take to analyse the contents of a hundred random flash drives (perhaps due to some unforeseen technical problem), and never got to the interesting bit.
Of course, the press don't care about academic merit. And it is an important lesson for the people who won't learn from it.