This could just be from a classic issue that comes up with organic intelligences. Where do people most commonly see ‘touch’ used, after all? It's very common to see it in build processes, used only on empty files, whereas using it to update the timestamp of a file with contents is more obscure (I don't know if I've ever seen it in the wild, personally). If you asked random developers “what does ‘touch’ do?”, and they weren't primed to think unusually carefully about it, you might well get something around creating empty files as the dominant answer, via extrapolating from a biased pile of examples rather than going to an authoritative source.

In natural language, this leads to semantic drift. In programming languages, semantic drift leads to bugs.

I had forgotten that touch creates files, not just updates the timestamp. I was watching the video and was confused until he demoed its usage.