And honestly even though we all agree about this in my field (condensed matter) we still try to get our work published there because it's what helps people get ahead in academic life.
It's such a perverse vicious cycle that can't seem to be broken...
They might be familiar with a subfield where there's a strong culture of accountability through reproduction of experimental results. Certain parts of molecular biology at least used to be that way.
most bio papers in nature are irreproducible, except by a few top competitive labs, and even then, most don't bother unless they don't believe the results.
As someone who did computational biophysics, my opinion is that MD is meaningless and those plots don't tell you anything of value. Most likely, the senior author is friends with a MD expert and wanted an excuse to put the friend on the paper.
This type of visualisation appears pretty common in such papers so I think perhaps the authors believe that they now need to include them to get published, a cargo cult of sorts.
