We already knew there was likely to be something fishy about the most distant supernovas, because we have two divergent values for the Hubble constant, one of them based on these same supernovas.
But that would mean that disputes about the value of the Hubble Constant are also disputes about the age of the universe, and vice versa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy#Evidence_of_existe...
The article stipulates what convinced these people that it was there, namely that they rested their conclusions on an assumption that turned out to be wrong.
This result is based on the assumption that the corrected luminosity of SN Ia through the empirical standardization would not evolve with redshift.
Which is another good reason not to make conclusive judgements based on unproven assumptions (not that everyone that "dark energy" must exist, but many did, and some people still cling to it even if the face of this study). It is also a good example of why one should never give credence to a theory or a supposition based on how many other people give it credence - stick to what you can prove.