That's pretty common in academia. You publish something new that is worse than the state-of-the-art. To maintain some semblence of meaning for your work, you you then say that the shortcomings will be addressed in future papers. Often these papers never surface because somewhere along the way it turns out that even though your approach was new, it is fundamentally worse. This kind of stuff happens all the time in research and it only makes it to the surface thanks to this twisted publish or perish world academics now live in.
A counter perspective: it’s a good thing these ideas make it to the surface! Clearly someone thought it was a good enough idea to try, now others can have better data before trying that same rabbit hole
The sad part about the whole situation is that one has to hype the research as the new best thing ever rather than an experiment that was well motivated (not all of them are) with results that weren’t as nice as hoped
There's even a push for precommitments (e.g. "I'm doing an experiment on X that will finish on YY/ZZ") so that even if a failed experiment results in nothing publishable, other researchers will know not to waste their time trying to repeat it.
