While I agree that publishers charging high open access fees is a bad practice, the ACS journals aren’t the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel predatory journals you’re describing. ACS nano in particular is a well respected journal for nanochem, with a generally well-respected editorial board, and any suspicions of editorial misconduct of the type you’re describing would be a three-alarm fire in the community.

I will also note that this article is labelled “free to access” – when the authors have paid an (as you said, exhorbitant) publishing fee to have the paper be open access, the tag used by ACS is “open access”.

Also, the fact that the authors had a little fun with the title doesn’t mean its low-effort slop – this was actually an important critique at the time, because for years people had been adding different modifications to graphene and making a huge deal about how revolutionary their new magic material was.

The point this paper was trying to make is that finding modifications to graphene which make it better for electrocatalysis is not some revolutionary thing, because almost any modification works. It was actually a useful recalibration for expectations, as well as a good laugh.