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To be fair it only claimed "near self-repairing".

The headline is more ambitious, that's probably what they meant

One could think of it as mostly self-repairing with some outside encouragement.

Nope. "Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself".

Exactly. You can place a patch with some glue over a hole in fabric to achieve the same thing in a traditional garment. Iron-on repair patches are also similar.

It's one thing to say "get it wet and leave it in the sun". It's another thing to require identical replacement material and nutrient slurry (I don't know about you, but I think I can source fabric glue more easily than potato water).

Does the fresh fungus need to be genetically identical? I read something about mycelial nuclei in high school and it was weird.

I guess they're just trying to get the networks to interlace, not to reconstitute into a single organism and be capable of nutrient exchange, so I don't think it matters if they're identical or not.

Well you gotta recharge it of course, just not with a power cord.