How many hidden constraints govern a rival theory of gravity?

Newer General Relativity replaces Einstein's curvature with a quantity called nonmetricity to describe gravity, but its true degrees of freedom were incompletely understood. Systematically working through the Hamiltonian structure, the authors find a previously unreported degeneracy in the scalar sector that produces either one or two extra constraints depending on the theory's free parameters — a distinction that directly affects how many physical degrees of freedom propagate. Getting this count right is essential before claiming any such theory is a viable alternative to general relativity.