I think you are reading too much into this, "We" is the term that is commonly used in papers to refer to self. It doesn't necessarily have to be a group of people. Of course English is my second language but from hundreds of scientific papers that I've read, I don't remember ever seeing someone use "I".
Agreed. In my past studies I've found the use of "we" in the academic papers: math, physics, cosmology, etc.
It turns out that the use of "we" is simply the polite way to write the paper, whereas the use of "I" or "my" comes off as too arrogant and thus detracts from the topic in the paper, and so, "we" is predominantly used when presenting the results of an experiment, since it is meant to show that it is the experiment that produced the data and necessarily "me".
https://www.enago.com/academy/we-vs-they-using-first-or-third-person-in-a-research-paper/