Did they run the checker across a body of papers before LLMs were available and verify that there were no citations in peer reviewed papers that got authors or titles wrong?
Exactly as you said, do precisely this to pre-LLM works. There will be an enormous number of errors with utter certainty.
People keep imperfect notes. People are lazy. People sometimes even fabricate. None of this needed LLMs to happen.
> You also don't need gunpowder to kill someone with projectiles, but gunpowder changed things in important ways. All I ever see are the most specious knee-jerk defenses of AI that immediately fall apart.