Journalism about physics has always been like this. The Alcubierre drive is 25 years old, even before that there were widely-publicized discussions of the same kind of idea: invert the equations and come up with interesting results.

The realities of space travel are kind of grim: months to visit even nearby uninhabitable planets and decades to get anywhere interesting. Relativity has always been a huge and ever-increasing impediment to that, and the ways in which it is have percolated out. There's also the demand for hard science fiction with space battles (I personally am a fan!) that similarly runs aground on "you can't have a galactic empire where it takes a hundred years to reach the next province over".

So there's lots of demand for "hey this thing makes FTL travel possible" and not as much demand for "scientists publish paper but everything still sucks".