I would not really call it random. While it was open for feedback/contributions.

There is a strong requirements for substantial contribution to the paper itself to qualify for authorship.

So unfortunately that does limit it in part to folks who are more familiar in writing such papers, have the resources for doing benchmarks, and charting, etc

And less so for folks who for eg, tinkers, contributed to dataset, porting the implementation to X lang, doing LoRa, or various other experiments that has nothing to do with the core architecture

Sorry I didn't mean to say "random" in the sense of stochastic, more like "eclectic". Usually when I saw such papers with eclectic author mix, at least a few are listed as independent researchers or unaffiliated (even though they might have a PhD or are applying to grad schools or whatever). I was wondering maybe I'm out of date and everyone in those circumstances now just has a 'doing research as' corporate alias.

Ahh. As someone who has been listed as “independent researcher” before. I get what you mean - oh well, it is what it is