I think Stephanie is correct in this, we cannot "trust" the AnukramaNīs. That is not to say that they are not reliable,
but I do not think they are really author lists. I argue in "Exploring Impossible Authors" (
https://yhc.academia.edu/CaleyCharlesSmith) that what they attribute is not authorship but a kind of speakership. Who is the dramatis persona in the 1st person, as it were, and thus the
devatā is not just the dedicand but a figure in the 2nd person. In other words, the
sūkta is understood as a past speech event immortalized in poetic form which in recitation is re-created, re-establishing various relationships, etc. So just as we cannot "trust" that a poem has a real historical female author, in a sense we cannot trust that any of the authors are historically real. That's not what AnukramaNīs are interested in. Rather they are interested in cataloging the important figures of memory who lent a kind of authority to the
sūkta, who were imitated in performance, and to whom new compositions could be attributed. There are parallels here, I think, not just for how new texts appear in the mouth of the Buddha or new tantras from Śiva, but also how Israelite psalms and proverbs gradually became attributed to David and Solomon respectively. My book ms will deal with this extensively.