I find the actual paper more readable and understandable than this summarization.
That said, this is honestly just a bad article that is needlessly sensationalized and fails to impart any real knowledge.
There's a joke to be made here, since the issue is with zero-knowledge proof systems.
I honestly think that Quanta Magazine just found the perfect formula to farm HN traffic. The titles are clearly carefully engineered for this audience: not the outright clickbait of university press releases, but vague profoundness that lets us upvote without reading the whole thing and then chime in with tangential anecdotes.
I don't think they're bad people, but I honestly think they end up on the front page multiple times a week not on the quality of the articles alone.
Maybe all these elaborate analogies of Alice walking into a cave and Bob yelling which exit she should come out of, Alice wanting to sell Bob a Hamiltonian cycle trustlessly, Alice and Bob mixing buckets of paint and shipping them via the mail back and forth etc. are working for some people, but it's not me.