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“it is they who refer to the degraded cells as not unlike bird or croc skin”

—But that isn’t from an analysis of soft tissue, but of rock which has formed into the shape of the dino’s skin. Usually soft tissue degrades away before it can be fossilized, but in this case much of it lasted long enough that it, too, fossilized much as bones often do. Of course, when paleontologists say that a bone has been preserved, they (usually) don’t mean they literally found bone tissue, but instead that a rock has been found in the shape of a bone that preserves many of its anatomical features. In this case rock has been found that preserves many of the anatomical features of the skin that allows them to compare it to the skin of crocs and birds.

As for the find of “soft tissue”, the only soft tissue I saw mentioned are amino acids (which in many conditions are nearly indestructible).
I’m Actually a bit surprised that in a structure so well preserved that not even proteins survived. As I’ve mentioned before, it wasn’t that long ago that many scientists were hopeful that we’d begin finding dino dna - and perhaps even begin sequencing them (one of the things that inspired Jurassic Park). Decades later we’re still looking for the first dino nucleobase. Even finding proteins is proving incredibly difficult, and they are FAR hardier and last VASTLY longer than dna.
So perhaps the “rational explanation” is that dinos are far older than we thought? :-) Or maybe it’s that we don’t understand very well how preservation works in many conditions.