It's more like when USA Today says "NASA possibly found alien life on Mars." The path from the workers' "Compound A-9512 is present in thygmolonogical quantities in martian topsoil" to the PR office's "We found really exciting organic compounds on mars" to mainstream news's "Possible alien life found on mars" is so predictable and happens the same way every single time. It's depressing.

In my experience, it's not the scientists (NASA or JET in this case) that utter such statements but journalists. NASA scientists will say something like "we've encountered something new, but we're not jumping to conclusions until we've investigated fully" and then you'll see some bloggers/journalists putting out clickbait titles like "Possible alien life discovered on Mars!"

In this case, the celebration seems well-reasoned. From the article:

"It's a landmark because they demonstrated stability of the plasma over five seconds. That doesn't sound very long, but on a nuclear timescale, it's a very, very long time indeed. And it's very easy then to go from five seconds to five minutes, or five hours, or even longer."

Can you give an example where NASA has actually said they found possible life?

And then there's all those times where it was not in fact nothing but major scientific progress.

It's not, until it is...