This to me reads like an absolutely bog standard statement that would be made at any university PR piece about any novel nucleic acid system like this one. The paper itself will usually be more restrained but still attempt to gain some status via comparison.

It also is clearly novel in the scientific sense. This is not a known system and it may resemble some attributes of similar systems but it differs substantially in its arrangement, since it's not clearly a retron.

As for if it is for PR. Yes, I don't disagree about that.