Huh? The topic of the newscientist article is https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03034 (it links to the PDF right at the bottom!) and in the preprint's references section is "Verlinde, E. P., 2016, preprint, (arXiv:1611.02269)", which is surely the "Verlinde's theory of Emergent Gravity" that Brouwer et al. mean.

The evidence in Brouwer et al. is shaky, and I am not a fan of Verlinde's paper (although it is interesting), but I don't see what it has to do with MOND. Indeed, in Brouwer et al., I can't even see a reference to MOND.

Only in the newscientist article is there a scattering of the abbreviation "MOND", and the article goes so far as to (entirely unjustifiably) say, "[Verlinde's Emergent Gravity] also builds on controversial models of so-called modified gravity, such as the Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) theory of Mordehai Milgrom".

Instead Verlinde's work builds on Ted Jacobson's work from twenty years ago (arXiv:1505.04753) (cf. Verlinde's first paragraph in section 5) and it is no surprise that discussions directly with Jacobson are disclosed in the acknowledgments section.

Sure Milgrom is also further down in the acknowledgments section and MOND is in the references in force, but consider Verlinde's, "We like to emphasize that we have not derived the theory of modified Newtonian dynamics as proposed by Milgrom. In our description there is no modification of the law of inertia, nor is our result (7.43) to be interpreted as a modified gravitational field equation." (top of Verlinde's page 39). Further down, "although we derived the same relation as modified Newtonian dynamics, the physics is very different". (emphasis mine)

Indeed, if you look at my link in the comment you replied to, you'll see in the first paragraph that his unremovable background is standard GR dS.

Other than in the newscientist article, I think you can't really find anywhere that conflates MOND-like approaches with Verlinde's emergent gravity. They are very different theories. The key point though is that Verlinde's is more fundamental and MOND-like and FLRW-like results can emerge from it at appropriate length scales (and \Lambda is simply built in).

But that's the point of emergent theories; you can derive the emergent theory from the more fundamental one, but you can't derive the fundamental theory from the emergent one. And in Verlinde's work, the fundamental theory, for better or worse (fwiw, I think worse) is strings in dS, and what emerges is General Relativity as an effective field theory with some IR corrections.

Finally, what I think is most interesting about Verlinde's paper is that string people usually avoid dS. "That's interesting and not outrageously wrong" is not saying that it is anything close to a complete theory (it does not even seem wholly self-consistent), or that the paper is especially well structured. At best you could say that since I am open-minded about the possibility that our current fundamental theories emerge from something more fundamental, but that's hardly an a priori reason to favour Verlinde's EG, or anyone else's. I don't even know where you got that from; maybe instead of "You may think" you meant "Someone might think".