is it more than a commentary on overfitting to the tune of "with enough epicycles you can make the elephant wiggle its trunk"?

If you are referring to Hagerty+Srinivasan:

They certainly didn't think that a better fit => "truer".

They used the term "truer" to describe a model that more accurately captures the underlying causal structure or "true" relationship between variables in a population.

As for the paper I linked, I still haven't read it closely enough to confirm that D-Machine's comment below is a good dismissal.

I'm inclined to think it's more like "interpolating vs extrapolating"