I guess it depends what you mean by LK-99. They didn't have any luck with their early batches and it wasn't until after an extended break in adjunct professorship and industry that they got back together. A happy accident happened where they bumped it part way through trying to synthesize it and they got a sample with some of the properties that kept them going. So in 99, they were just following the advice of their mentor who was a professor. The NYT coverage is misleading in that they weren't really sitting on room temperature and pressure superconductors for 20+ years.