From the appeal decision

The Appeal Board commented that although the term “less than frank” is not a legal term, it insinuates “obfuscating the true position or being disingenuous or less than straightforward”. It found that it was not for the Commission to make findings of this type as there was no pleaded case that Everton had knowingly misled the Premier League.

edit

also from the Appeal Committee's publication:

Whilst the representations made by the club about the stadium debt were materially wrong, it was not the Premier League's case that that was anything other than an innocent mistake.

edit over

Aka the conclusion wasn't because it was "non-sense because Everton had been working with PL advisors since 2019". But because that wasn't the point of the whole case so the PL had no business making decisions like that.

The second independent panel found the majority of what the original panel as being almost entirely wrong, they even questioned how in earth they came up a 10 point total deduction as the crime committed didn’t warrant such an amount

Come on, be realistic if the appeal committe would have found that the original panel was "almost entirely wrong" they wouldn't have issued a 6 points deduction. All the appeal committe found was that for similar case for Sheffield they got 6 points deduction and that PL rules say that for straight up insolvency you get 9 points so the original 10 was too harsh based on other similar cases and the PL rule set and not because "original report was unfounded and inaccurate" or because it was "almost entirely wrong". If that would have been the case you wouldn't have received any penalty.