I looked into it and I think I understand what happened here: The publication is starting from a soft reset after changing the difficulty. This wasn't mentioned in the submission text, likely wasn't picked up by the site parser at the time (the run was made on FCEU.0.98.26, and
the FCM format can't be trusted to report whether or not the movie is starting from a quicksave or a reset), and was almost certainly overlooked in the original judgement, which caused it to be overlooked again when it was unrejected for Vault. This shouldn't have been published, but I can see why it was and I feel like anyone would have made the same mistake in that position.
Are you planning on improving it? If so, just start from Power On and change the difficulty from the options menu. The time lost doing that won't count, in fact it will ensure that the new run is proven legitimate. In the meantime, staff will figure out what to do with the publication with this knowledge.