it didn't have a dedicated cabinet.

This is true of many, many games. Eventually JAMMA made swapping games the norm. When a game stopped making money or was too expensive to fix (glares in Namco's direction), you bought a relatively inexpensive kit, swap the board, stick on new side art and marquee, and maybe add some buttons to the control panel, send it out the door as a new game.

I work in the arcade industry. Fighting games were the big deal, then stagnated. I'm in the US midwest, so hunting games got huge, then only the fancy online ones were left standing (Big Buck Hunter Pro). So, here we have: Mortal Kombat 3 converted to Deer Hunting USA, Killer Instinct converted to Sammy Extreme Hunting, Virtua Fighter 2 converted to Trophy Hunting Bear & Moose...

It's sad/maddening looking through warehouses, but now that classics are popular again, I can sometimes find the old boards and kit the cabinets back to what they used to be. Glad to work somewhere that allows this provided I'm not spending too much; it can be labor-intensive if a cabinet is "mutilated" after having five different games over its lifetime and people trying to cobble in whatever working CRT monitor they had. I swear, every manufacturer and model had different dimensions and mounting (see Standards). Different monitor has a frame hits the back cabinet wall? Sawzall holes and build a wooden box to cover it, we need this game out the door and making money again.

Edit: We also still make money from old stuff by putting them in hotels' and campgrounds' game rooms... water damage and pool chlorine basically makes those places "arcade game hospice", they go there to die.

So SEGA and Konami (the corporation) knew about it. Let's assume that. Are there records or interviews (from studios, individual developers, games historians, etc.) from that time on record saying they played and enjoyed it?

Simultaneous/independent invention in a highly experimental and novel industry is way more likely to me, but if you can produce some sort of proof of influence on studios that explicitly iterated on what 005 did, then that's much more convincing than a Guinness World Record that only "proves" they were first (historically, they did barely any fact-checking and, in some cases, you could bribe them).

It also hurts the credibility of the article for it to say "people liked it," and then not link to any sources like reviews or sales numbers. How can I know that anyone liked it unless I do independent verification of these claims? It's striving to be informative but with a "trust me bro" type of approach.