Aye, this is just for claiming, not for causing pilots to abandon their ships. You still need to scare them out of their ships.
Early in your game it's not that big a deal to claim them yourself, but eventually abandoned ships start building up in sectors, especially the low hull value ones that don't seem worth the trouble. This is where the SCS shines letting your TL or M1 claim all the abandoned ships left in your wake while you do better things.

It can, of course, be used on a smaller scale with smaller ships using
scenarios 4 & 5.
I was finding myself intentionally blowing up low-hull abandoned ships just to keep the sectors clean. Now I don't! And I've started to care about forcing enemies to abandon again, which I hadn't for a while.