“It has generally been assumed that waves are 2D”

Any surfer could explain a “double up” or “wedge” and of course a rogue wave is the same phenomena. Google “fan wave” there is 100s of photographs of examples of this pheneoma the article claims is rarely captured.

Wave science is generally very far behind wave engineering. I’m pretty shocked when I look through papers how much is missing compared to colloquial knowledge among surfers.

Generally there isn’t much funding for the field and the theory falls way behind known phenomena and their understanding. But there is a fairly large surf industry now. Surfline(the largest forecasting company) has much better wave mechanics explanations than anything you can find in academic literature.