Yes, authors of articles rarely get to choose the headline, at most, they can suggest one. The editors choose the headline and often their motivation is to maximize clicks.

Ars Technica in particular sometimes uses A/B testing, randomly giving readers one of two headlines to see which one generates more clickthroughs (they've been transparent about that, there was an article describing it).

Hello! Author here (for real). Yes I didn't have much say in the headline but I'm fine with it, it's technically what the authors of the paper I covered were saying.

And thanks, hope you enjoyed the article! Regardless of whether this result stands up to scrutiny, I think this was a nice jumping off point to explain Pop III stars, and some of the interesting work JWST is doing here that people are probably not aware of (eg the programs mentioned at the end of the article).