Text below about 3px is invisible to a human but fully indexable. Whether or not it is deliberate, it matches the keyword-stuffing pattern that ranking systems demote for.
Impact is importance multiplied by the confidence tier’s weight — SPECIFICATION 1.0, RESEARCH 0.7, EMERGING 0.3, EXPERIMENTAL 0.1. Two rules backed by the same class of evidence therefore always carry the same weight, which is what makes the score reproducible rather than hand-tuned.