that's why you would do a longitudinal study. Pick a cohort of individuals that are entering a high-risk-of-burnout field, and the control will be the pre-burnout individual and the experiment would be monitoring them over time. Of course this doesn't really fit funding/research promotion cycles in science.
I don't see how the study you linked is "hypothesis-based," exactly; it's just an imaging study and thus is likely wrong because of the fMRI bug.