Take random data – no trends. Put it into Mikey’s Magical Mathematical Mincing Machine. Out pops a hokey stick..maybe not every time, but many times.
My man Joe Sixpack says that if the hockey stick wasn’t in the data to begin with and nobody has tampered with the M5, then it was the M5 that created the hockey stick.
All the rest just seems to be nitpicking about semantics. And your dislike for the conclusion and/or the author.