What's wrong with desalination research? Water is essential to life, and most water on Earth is salinated. The practical value of this research is apparent, both for ships on sea and coastal regions. So I don't see how these attempts are "worthless", and how it would be bad if they receive more "free money".

The article talks about what could have been a challenge faced by the junkyard scrap model, and how they solved it:

Each stage contained an evaporator and a condenser that used heat from the sun to passively separate salt from incoming water. That design, which the team tested on the roof of an MIT building, efficiently converted the sun’s energy to evaporate water, which was then condensed into drinkable water. But the salt that was left over quickly accumulated as crystals that clogged the system after a few days. In a real-world setting, a user would have to place stages on a frequent basis, which would significantly increase the system’s overall cost.

In a follow-up effort, they devised a solution with a similar layered configuration, this time with an added feature that helped to circulate the incoming water as well as any leftover salt. While this design prevented salt from settling and accumulating on the device, it desalinated water at a relatively low rate.

In the latest iteration, the team believes it has landed on a design that achieves both a high water-production rate, and high salt rejection, meaning that the system can quickly and reliably produce drinking water for an extended period. The key to their new design is a combination of their two previous concepts: a multistage system of evaporators and condensers, that is also configured to boost the circulation of water — and salt — within each stage.

I'm not sure how much money is in desalination, but it's certainly an industry. If a group comes up with a new method, and then nothing happens with it, it's probably because it's either not that great after all, or not that cost effective.

Maybe a problem is that the countries where it's needed the most are not exactly the richest countries: https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress#what-share-of-freshwater-resources-do-we-use

several countries across the Middle East, North Africa & South Asia have extremely high levels of water stress. Many, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Syria, Pakistan, Libya have withdrawal rates well in excess of 100 percent — this means they are either extracting unsustainably from existing aquifer sources, or produce a large share of water from desalinisation.