To be explicitly fair, I played loose with the “R² is too low” language in the article. If I were to be proper and correct, I would go through the motions to determine whether an R² that low is or isn’t statistically significant, but honestly, I don’t think it really matters. With R² numbers that tremendously small, bickering over whether the data is minutely correlated or uncorrelated doesn’t really matter. If you have to control against 100 other variables to show a relationship, well what that means to me is that there are 100 other more important variables with which to concern ourselves.