Hmmm, I’ve always taken the Recent Evidence DQA to mean this – organism was here sometime in the last 100 years (or not).
That being iNat’s definition, Recent Evidence=Yes could mean anything, including that the organism was present right at the time of observation. Recent Evidence=No, on the other hand, would be a clear reason for excluding an observation from observation and phenology statistics. But since No results in Casual status, I suspect that is already what happens.