I don't know who Patricia Churchland is, but they said that the paper was "very carefully and insightfully worked out."
After having read the paper, I am very disappointed in the output. Nothing concrete was shown, just hypothesis and reads more like philosophy. That being said, I would say that the paper is carefully worked out and does provide insight if you haven't thought about RL before.
If Patricia Churchland doesn't have a problem with the paper despite it being philosophical, then that's probably because she is a philosopher. An eliminative materialist, to be precise.
Personally, from reading the abstract, I disagree with the hypothesis. There's a trick where anything (even say, a database lookup) looks like optimization as long as you contrive the objective function just right, but that's kind of uninformative.
After having read the paper, I am very disappointed in the output. Nothing concrete was shown, just hypothesis and reads more like philosophy. That being said, I would say that the paper is carefully worked out and does provide insight if you haven't thought about RL before.