Surely you should blame the airlines, rather than the individuals. They cram more people on, giving you less space - but charge the same - and you get mad at other customers, rather than them for cramming you in.
We replicated the behavior (somewhat) of the article, using podman, as a way to allow devs to SSH into a container that was identical to the CI/CD environment.
It also mapped in their NFS home drive, so they could quickly SSH into the container to try a build, to see if it was their dev machine, or a real issue.
It did allow them to choose their container though.
Yes, you're right, it is the isostatic unloading that they're referring to - but in regards to the 'sucking', they seem to mean that the semi-localised unloaded of the top of crust (via rain, river incision) creates a zone of lower lithostatic pressure, and so that area ends up getting pushed up to maintain isostatic equilibrium. Not truly a 'sucking', but as an analogy, I think it's OK.
It's more easily seen as part of the critical wedge angle for fold and thrust belts.
I would say assuming sciences are somehow not affected by these sorts of factors is worse than what the humanities do - at least they admit a bias.
From my own experiences in the hard sciences, the human-factor dominates over objectivity, from the individual through to peer review.
I vaguely built something similar for Sydney, but in showing how good/bad public transport is than driving (hint: it's way worse to catch PT): http://www.publictransport-or-drive.com/
It pretty much makes a isochrone maps all over the city, and gets google public transport and driving times and creates a ratio.
I've started to work on a better version 2, but so far not much work.