Could this hack have allowed for the printing of eth on solana that did not actually exist on the eth blockchain or was it limited to real eth that had been bridged to solana?
You probably could have printed infinite fake ETH on Solana, but soon enough someone would have noticed that the amount in circulation exceeded what was stored in the bridge which should be impossible.
They did use some of the fake weETH to trade for 430k SOL, valued at a little under $40 million.
They can print unlimited Solana wETH, but it’s worthless if it cannot be exchanged for Ethereum ETH. In this case the Ethereum contract would not have had the funds to redeem all of the IOUs (wETH) in existence on Solana.