Lost Roman emperor Sponsian ... really?

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0274285

I don't know what is the most fascinating about this, the story itself or the way the media is reacting to it. Sponsian's story seems to me to have the potential to be quite heroic and exciting, if only we could find out more about it. The insistence on depicting him as a 'real Roman emperor' (in the media in general, not so much this article) seems to me to be a stretch and rather an irrelevance and distraction.

Self-proclaimed emperors who failed to win widespread acceptance are more usually referred to as "usurpers". I can only imagine the people behind the study figured that insisting he was a "real emperor" would make for more publicity.