There is also incentives to adapt the message to the outlet. If you send that data to peer review and say we found 40% increase, the reviewers would reject it, so they have to moderate themselves. But if you send a summary to the university’s outreach outlet saying that we found something or nothing we don’t know, then they would also reject putting it out. So even for the authors, the incentive is to send a careful conclusion to peer review and an overblown one to popsci.

Btw, I also think a 95% confidence interval is just the wrong statistic to look at given that data, and that they could probably have analyzed it better.