Harvard physicist's take on the VMS

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And while "gibberish" is always a theoretical possibility, historical and common sense arguments say that it is very unlikely in the case of the VMS.

Quite the contrary. Here we have a manuscript whose plants are difficult to match to other herbal traditions, labels are ridiculously short, text is unlike any other of its time/place, and if it's a cipher, it's totally anachronistic. Ciphers of this time relied on simple substitution or multiple alphabets, increasing entropy, rather unconstrained morphology, 1:1 word mapping for the most part. You'd have to jump ~70 years past the C14 dating to have Trithemius putting forward novel methods of encryption.

The ms. is on the cheap end when it comes to quality material as well as craftmanship.

Folded bifolia instead of quaternions or what-have-you?
Relatively short amount of text (when entropy-corrected) but hundreds of nymphs?

No surviving tables in the Astrological section. No apparent numbers or formulaic sentences like "Caldo in 2o grado", "So nim ____ und verbrenn ____ bis zum ____" & whatnot, no evident links to humoral theory in most of the ms, almost no marginalia notes in Voynichese, addenda or corrections made by the author(s) except for rare (read: very rare) occasions of clear glyph replacement or a squeezed in line in one of the later quires.
Short labels re-used with no clear pattern between nymphs/stars/plants. No clear punctuation nor word order. No internal consistency.
We can't even map the few plant labels that re-appear in Pharma back to Herbal sections. Nor does the red-berry plant that's apparently repeated 2-3 times in the VMS have internal consistency at the text level.

Common sense, when stripped of wishful thinking that it were a cipher, points to a manuscript that didn't cost much time or money (even less if that cost and effort was split by 2-8 people), was first drawn by somebody who somehow didn't think of binding sections in quaternia for some reason, is not practical to swift through or look something up, and furthermore was not up to current standards of herbology, medicine and perhaps not even astrology. Hoaxes and charlatans are not a modern invention, so it stands to reason that the VMS could be such a case. Did I mention text patterns are consistent with human gibberish? (Gask. & Bow.)

Therefore, if that paper concluded that Voynichese is (or is likely to be) meaningless gibberish, we can confidently say that it is mistaken, even without analyzing its arguments.

Uh... no? Gibberish is a perfectly valid explanation, and confidently dismissing research without glancing at it just because the conclusion isn't to one's liking is not how it works. You read the methodology, you check what's being done, and then you check if the conclusion follows from the base assumptions and its results.