The measure of success should be relapse after treatment, but AA doesn't have the concept of stopping, and more importantly does not consider relapse after ceasing attendance to be a failure of their 12 step program.
This ignores the moral corruptness of praying on, and essentially mandating indoctrination, of people in need of help.
The debunking you're quoting has presumably been superseded by the much higher-quality randomized studies reported on in the article. At least, if that's not the case, then the researchers who've published the new meta-analysis lack even basic competence, which seems unlikely.
That old 2015 article is out of date, and the brand new Cochrane review presents evidence which downright contradicts a number of its findings. Notably, that old article claims AA has a 5% success rate, but the new Cochrane review sees a 41.8% success rate for people who got treatment which got them in the rooms of AA.
Some basic googling found https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irr... from 2015, which covers most of my understanding of AA.
The measure of success should be relapse after treatment, but AA doesn't have the concept of stopping, and more importantly does not consider relapse after ceasing attendance to be a failure of their 12 step program.
This ignores the moral corruptness of praying on, and essentially mandating indoctrination, of people in need of help.