This is why the machine learning community will go through ArXiv for pretty much everything. We value open and honest communication and abhor knowledge being locked down. This is why he views things this way. Because he's involved in a community that values real science.
ArXiv is free and all modern science should be open. There were reasons for publications in the past, since knowledge dissemination was hard, and they facilitated it. Now the publications just gatekeep.
Science is pushing the bounds of human knowledge. Science is only science if it propagates, otherwise it's just someone's discovery. Science has to be built upon, even if it's disproven, that means it was documented well enough to be built upon. That's not to say everything that's disproven is science, because crackpot theories don't often push the bounds of human knowledge.
I hope the brilliant students get their knowledge out there. (But that is unfortunately hard in academia. Despite us living in what should be a post knowledge scarcity society, we clearly aren't.)