This comment is highly underrated

While I agree that publishers charging high open access fees is a bad practice, the ACS journals aren't the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel predatory journals you're describing. ACS nano in particular is a well respected journal for nanochem, with a generally well-respected editorial board, and any suspicions of editorial misconduct of the type you're describing would be a three-alarm fire in the community.

I will also note that this article is labelled "free to read" -- when the authors have paid an (as you said, exhorbitant) publishing fee to have the paper be open access, the label used by ACS journals is "open access". The "free to read" label would be an editorial decision, typically because the article is relevant outside the typical readerbase of the journal, and so it makes sense both from a practical perspective (and more cynically for the journal's PR) to make it available to everyone, not just the community who has institutional access.

Also, the fact that the authors had a little fun with the title doesn't mean its low-effort slop -- this was actually an important critique at the time, because for years people had been adding different modifications to graphene and making a huge deal about how revolutionary their new magic material was.

The point this paper was trying to make is that finding modifications to graphene which make it better for electrocatalysis is not some revolutionary thing, because almost any modification works. It was actually a useful recalibration for expectations, as well as a good laugh.

Edit: typo

Can you explain this a bit better?

I've seen many journals with this "open access" option (where the authors pay for open access, rather than the readers paying to read it). But the paid option never skipped the peer review process, as far as I can tell.

I just think the last author of this paper is a big deal in his field and can do whatever