It's explain in some detail in the article, but in essence, imagine a fine pen line which in 540p would be less than one pixel wide but in 2160p would be multiple pixels wide.
The problem solved by Anime4K algorithm is essentially producing sharp edges of the line when upscaled to 4k, which is a different problem from upscaling a <1 pixel antialiased line.
How about using the same algorithm to upscale 540p to 1080p, and compare with 1080p ground truth? Would that not be sufficient?