  In this paper, we take a closer look at the claims made by Xu and Zhou in
their paper "SAT Requires Exhaustive Search" [XZ23], which claims to provide a
lower bound on the complexity of the so-called Model RB. Xu and Zhou conclude
that their result implies a separation between P and NP, since the lower bound
purportedly proves that the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) is true.
In examining Xu and Zhou's arguments, we find a flaw in their main theorems.
The authors assume that an algorithm for Model RB must have a certain structure
that can leverage downward self-reducibility, and argue that such an algorithm
cannot run in polynomial time. We argue that this structure is not guaranteed
to exist and thus their paper neither proves SETH to be true nor proves P
$\neq$ NP.
