I read this article as saying, "hey we can emulate bfloat16 pretty well in software on top of our existing hardware features". That's what "graft" and "minimal impact" mean to me.

Intel (for better or worse) takes a very experiment-results-driven approach to choosing which features to implement in hardware. So this result -- that software emulation of a feature works almost as well as a hardware implementation would -- probably makes Intel less likely to implement the feature in hardware.

ARM, AMD, RISCV etc, will probably come to similar conclusions.