99.9% of 3D graphics: "Computer, here's a definition of some 3D surfaces and their properties. Produce a 2D projection."

This: "Computer, here's a 2D projection. Infer the likely 3D data that would produce the projection."

The comparison the article makes is against rendering a full voxel volume, as if occlusion was a great insight.

I think it describes it quite well as long as you assume the problem of making a 3D model from a picture is already a solved but computationally expensive problem. That's the part it doesn't go into but that's not what this research is about. Though I think most readers will still be interested in that - I didn't know it had been solved already.

It's not making a surface mesh, it's putting voxels on the surface. Again, it doesn't make that distinction very clear up front so I guess it's not targeted at people familiar with traditional 3D surface meshing.

The abstract is much better. At least they linked to it in the article.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00710

It's inferring the depth of all the points on the surface, including those it can't see in the image. This isn't surface rendering, it's depth estimation.