I guess what's different here is we're not using a $300 DSLR. We're using a $5 raspberry pi camera.
If we did the "let's take a bunch of high speed synchronized pictures with a strobe" on the cheap cameras, we'd see a single row of pixels worth of image, if we're lucky because of rolling shutter.
What we've done here is hack together some software to get a global shutter on these cheap cameras. Now that we can take pretty high speed pictures with $5, we scaled it up to get 16 cameras and took 16 angles of a bullet going though an apple, all at once. The "bullet time" examples in the repo are not computer graphics, they are 16 individual images played one after another.