This isn't as crazy as it seems. In some bread and cake recipes, you can easily replace some of the oil with applesauce and have a successful bake. I've done this with muffins and banana bread to great success.
They're still being foolish as you need some fat for most bakes to work and using apple sauce introduces more fiber, protein and water instead of fat, but it's not a totally baseless substitution.
I see your point. If you view the cells as separate contexts, then it would be necessary to specify that "the substitution" is the thing that didn't work out.
I see your point now. For me it doesn't really read like it, because you have it in another cell of the table which gives it too little weight as a possible context for dereferencing the pronoun, while also having a valid noun preceding the pronoun begging to become referenced by it.