Surely the converse is true: nothing ever happened at scale which didn't start off as a little example on a lab bench?
The vast majority of the living things on Earth didn't start off on a lab bench, they just mutated and evolved "out there," in nature.
Therefore the converse is not true.
Mutations don't happen at scale, they occur in single organisms. Therefore the converse is true!
I think the publication describes they scaled it to a 120L pilot reactor and ran the process continuously for 3 weeks feeding it 11 to 23 L of gas per min.
And this is a useless, low-effort point to make. If we waited for a technology to scale before posting about it on HN, it would already be old news.
The cautionary statements occasionally make sense for announcements around battery tech in particular. Here I agree it’s not useful