The paper was published by IEEE and with professors as co-authors. Only the second author is a student. And I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand like that because of a magazine article. Students come up with breakthroughs all the time. The paper itself says it disproves Yao's conjecture. I personally plan to implement and benchmark this because the results seem so good. It could be another fibonacci heap situation, but maybe not. Hash tables are so widely used, that it might even be worthwhile to make special hardware to use this on servers, if our current computer architecture is only thing that holds back the performance.
Edit: author sequence
That's very good. Once I wanted to compile Firefox myself for some reason I no longer remember, but their Mercurial-based system was a hassle to work with. Most of us are already familiar with git. So, I know I'm going to be more inclined to make code contributions now that it uses git.
Just wish they could've chosen another git-based option like Codeberg, or even an internally-hosted server. I'm rather wary of GitHub/Microsoft swallowing up so many open source projects.