That view seems reasonable to me and I agree that a clearer analysis would be useful.
An additional and very minor point I missed out from my comment is that I’m sceptical that the relationship between impact factor and retraction (original paper here) is causal. It seems very likely to me that something like “number of views of articles” would be a confounder, and it is not adjusted for as far as I can tell. I’m not totally sure that is the part of the article that you were referring to when citing this, so apologies if not!
That view seems reasonable to me and I agree that a clearer analysis would be useful.
An additional and very minor point I missed out from my comment is that I’m sceptical that the relationship between impact factor and retraction (original paper here) is causal. It seems very likely to me that something like “number of views of articles” would be a confounder, and it is not adjusted for as far as I can tell. I’m not totally sure that is the part of the article that you were referring to when citing this, so apologies if not!