It's novel, it's a huge iteration in the space. But, it's also being misrepresented as more significant than it is due to the summary being friendly to laypeople.

Isn't this what usually happens when the PR department of a university runs away with a story?

Not my area of expertise, but something can be academically novel and interesting without having any commercial or industrial applicability.

Not really. It's a different approach with different tradeoffs that are just as bad as the previously known ones.

That's probably why it wasn't picked up by a better journal and that nobody outside of the university where it happened is talking about it.