The Wright brothers were widely panned by experts in the field of manned flight. You should withhold judgement for a few more years at least until this plays out.
The article includes doubts from Seth Putterman who has said Taleyarkin's early experiments were flawed and has doubts about this experiment but even he says he expects eventual results from bubble fusion.
We'll see, but my paltry 5 years of Nuclear Engineering training
is severely balking at the physics and the engineering.