The obsession with ‘shorters’ is perplexing at the best of...

The obsession with ‘shorters’ is perplexing at the best of times.
NEU mkt. cap. AUD1.5b, ASX300 (XKO). Index wise, it's a minnow.
What NEU does present though is liquidity & price volatility, thus providing traders an opportunity to take positions. There’s no dark art here, it's a position, nor a personal attack on your individual holding. There’s little leverage going short on Wesfarmers, it simply doesn't have the comparable price volatility to exploit.
NEUs sits at 5.73% ‘short’. If NEU was 20% short, then I’d start asking questions.

Passive investing involves Index ETFs rebalance their weighting to maintain its tracking of the index. Substantial Shareholder Vanguard Group is the most active Index fund manager participating in this market.
Active investing, by contrast, does not have a rebalancing effect, as it involves a manager selecting stocks based on what the manager thinks the company is worth and if it is undervalued.
As a result of these changes, the ^‘weight’ of each stock in the benchmark will change, resulting in buying and selling by passive investors to reset portfolio weights to mirror the new benchmark weights.