I find that a lot of medical research literature is like this. A couple of "X is associated with increased mortality" papers that make no attempt at a causal analysis is enough to get doctors to recommend against X.

As far as I can tell, the organizations that make these recommendations don't want to run the risk that maybe the relationship is causal, and moreover don't know all the mediating/moderating factors and so can't safely recommend something that is associated with harming people even if they realize it's not necessarily causal.

The inverse is true for positive outcomes. Y is associated with lower mortality, so we recommend Y, even though we don't understand if it's causal or not. But we do not recommend Z which is closely similar to Y and, if there is a causal connection would share a common causal pathway with the Y benefit, because we have only studied Y and not Z.

It's a weird kind of extreme causal reasoning that ironically leads to a kind of abandonment of causal reasoning.