The thing that was the biggest contributor to the Epicureans being right about so much was their commitment to avoiding false negatives and insistence on not discounting explanations for things when they weren’t certain.

What is why it was weird they were so committed to the idea of the soul’s dependence on the body, particularly when their belief in eternal recurrence effectively provided the conditions for that not to be the case.

You can start from a materialist beginning and yet arrive at a non-materialist conclusion.