Three things:

First, people eat meat because it tastes good and is widely available. You can't make it not taste good, but we can insist on better regulatory requirements that might make meat more expensive or less ubiquitous. Every person seeks validation for the behaviors they choose every day. That's human nature, and that's why it's easy to false equivalences like avocados are worse than beef. People want to believe it because it's easier than changing. We're not going to save the planet by changing everybody. People need to be forced to change by law or by circumstance.

Second, this is terrible journalism. The author probably wanted to be a novelist, but nobody wanted to publish a young adult series about a girl who discovers she can talk to farm animals and is whisked away to a private school for animal talkers.

News articles, even editorials, don't require suspense. You don't build tension by slowly revealing information. This article is five paragraphs in before they get to anything resembling a point, and it's several more paragraphs of slowly revealing the findings of the study like a detective walking through the crime scene, discovering new clues along the way.

Third, the author is exactly the sort of smarmy, "told-ya-so" douchebag that carnists assume of all vegans. "... have you considered that vegans are annoying?" Yes. You are very annoying, and it undercuts the points you're trying to make.

We should be looking at the results of this study and trying to determine how to overcome the daily hurdles people face and disinformation campaigns of the meat industry. Calling people stupid for being fallible in ways all humans are is just mean-spirited and counterproductive.