  Rowlinson et al. 2023 recently claimed the detection of a coherent radio
flash 76.6 minutes after a short gamma-ray burst. They proposed that the radio
emission may be associated with a long-lived neutron star engine. We show
through theoretical and observational arguments that the coherent radio
emission, if real and indeed associated with GRB 201006A and at the estimated
redshift, is unlikely to be due to the collapse of the neutron star, ruling out
a blitzar-like mechanism. Instead, we show if a long-lived engine was created,
it must have been stable with the radio emission likely linked to the intrinsic
magnetar activity. However, we find that the optical upper limits require
fine-tuning to be consistent with a magnetar-driven kilonova: we show that
neutron-star engines that do satisfy the optical constraints would have
produced a bright kilonova afterglow that should already be observable by the
VLA or MeerKAT (for ambient densities typical for short GRBs). Given the
optical limits and the current lack of a kilonova afterglow, we instead posit
that no neutron star survived the merger, and the coherent radio emission was
produced far from a black hole central engine via mechanisms such as
synchrotron maser or magnetic reconnection in the jet -- a scenario consistent
with all observations. We encourage future radio follow-up to probe the engine
of this exciting event and continued prompt radio follow-up of short GRBs.
