The proper claim is that raising people from deficient (<20ng/ml) to a sufficient level (>30ng/ml ideally) should improve outcomes. Sometimes looking at a subset of those who started deficient is good enough to find such an effect, but sometimes it isn't, such as if the dose used was not high enough to raise people up enough, particularly common if the subjects weights were high which requires higher intakes to move the needle a lot, so other subset analysis look at norm-weight subjects. Proper study guidelines were published in the mid 2010s and meta-analyses like this one that aggregate many studies that don't conform to these guidelines are just as invalid as individual studies that don't.

For detailed treatment of this see this thread on X: https://x.com/KarlPfleger/status/1732514710715514883