I have to say, this article is exceptionally disappointing. As someone who works in this space, there are numerous misleading depictions about the state of the field. Almost any respectable simulation shows that disk galaxies are widely present at very early times. This is simply an argument of angular momentum conservation and these rotational states are simply more transient at early times compared to the local Universe.

"Yan found 87 distant galaxies behind the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723" --> this is not true. They found 87 galaxy candidates. To be fair to the article, they do note that these await spectroscopic confirmation but experts only believe those with spectroscopic confirmation. Everything else is tentative and we don't yet have good numbers on confirmation rates. Finally, the Yan et al candidates are wildly inconsistent with almost every other estimate of high-redshift galaxy samples. You can see a comparison in Table 4 here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.06683.pdf. They claim more than double the number of high-redshift sources compared to everyone else. JWST data is still very new and hard to both reduce and analyze. One particular problem is correlated hot pixels which can appear as very high-redshift sources. I don't know if this impacts the Yan et al paper but just an example of something that is not 100% straightforward to deal with. I highly recommend people take this with a healthy amount of skepticism until everything has a spectrum.