As someone who’s worked for the CMS experiment of LHC, I can assure you QED is fucking well tested in reality and isn’t “based on a single experimental value”, so the paper is indeed nonsense.
It isn’t the answer to everything because the electromagnetic force isn’t the only fundamental interaction and we don’t have a theory of everything. But QED explains one of the fundamental interactions far better than the paper tries to paint it. See The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov.