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If this did actually "destroy the RSA cryptosystem", seems like a proof of concept would actually be trivial to demonstrate. Given that, my bet is on this (or, rather, at least that particular sentence) being BS.

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That's not necessarily the case in general. If you had an algorithm which, given a billion dollars' worth of specialized lattice reduction ASICs, could break 2048-bit RSA in a few months' time, then for all practical purposes this would mean that 2048-bit RSA was broken -- there are plenty of state actors who would drop that kind of money in a heartbeat -- but that doesn't mean that some guy who came up with it would be able to do a demo on his laptop.

(Not saying that the above has anything to do with this paper in particular.)

But still it would be trivial to write a program that could demonstrate this, no? Something that you could show that perhaps broke an unreasonably short RSA key in a shorter time than expected.

Yeah I highly doubt the author of the paper would miss out on a chance like that. I think this is probably a lot of pearl clutching.

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