This article was supposedly reviewed. The reviewers are listed on the article's web page. This publisher is normally reputable, so I'd tend to believe it, even though the image was obviously not properly scrutinized. The article was also retracted after 3 days. I'm not saying there are no problems with science publications, but the things you are saying are not true for this one case. Also this is a secondary source, so there is no original data here, just an article citing a lot of primary sources to summarize the topic. So, the replication issue doesn't even apply to this paper. Again all valid issues in general, but not so much here...
It's definitely satire. 2 million lines of code is an absurd under-exageration. This post had me looking up the number of possible chess games, because if you coded chess like above you would have to have an if statement for every outcome, and it's 10^120 different possible games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number