I think the focus of PrivacyGuides is to find the “best of the best”, it’s just that having a stringent requirement on every recommendation is just not feasible, so the requirements got relaxed somewhat on categories with limited choices. You will notice a trend that the criteria is more strict specifically when there is a lot of choices/competition available (eg. Email, VPN, Cloud Storage), and less strict when the choices are limited (eg. Password Managers, Note taking software).
So it’s less hypocrisy/stupidity and more “nothing will pass our criteria if we don’t relax it a bit”, tagging @jonah for input
Edit 1: Idk why they’d recommend 1Password though