> You cannot zoom into real-life fractals infinitely like in those math animations, only a few times?

The point of the paper is that these are not 'real life fractals', so your correct declaration about the obviousness of real life fractals being bounded in their depth is not relevant, and does not make this paper pointless.

It's not obvious to me that fern branches are 'anatomically variable and non-iterating bifurcations', rather than a recursive process that bottoms out at a size boundary. Now I know.