I agree that the author lists in various metadata sources and databases are often a bit wrong (weird formatting of names for instance is very common), but many of the cases in the OP article are pretty egregious and far beyond just data entry issues.

Presumably the citation scanner they're using is relying on similar data sources as Zotero in any case to detect these sorts of issues.

Regardless, my comment still stands, it seems like the submission is relying on the actual text of the bibliography being correct, rather than requiring a machine readable citation metadata file of some sort, which would at least allow much of the quality control checks to be automated (and certainly would preclude complete hallucinations of nonexistent papers getting through).