Why do you think this is clickbait? The headline accurately describes the content of the article, which as far as I can tell accurately describes one result of this paper. Clickbait doesn't mean any interesting headline, it means a misleading and purely attention-grabbing headline.

It's like if someone proved P=NP and the magazine title was: "Mathematicians Measure Difficulty Levels, Find They're Equal."

Clickbait refers to vague titles that also overhype the story. Your example, if anything, underhypes it.

That's not a good headline, but it's not clickbait. If P vs. NP were a fairly obscure problem with little immediate impact outside of academia, that would be a fine layperson headline.

What would you have titled this Quanta article?

Maybe I misread, but I feel like solving P=NP would be closer to solving the continuum hypothesis whereas the article describes solving a related problem which could have disproved the hypothesis should it have been found that the two sets were not equal.

I was very confused by this. The paper linked by OP (the one I also had in mind when I started the article) is from 2012, but the article is written as if the results are recent (specifically it says from 2016! Admittedly, only five years for such a big result in that field is probably still "recent" to experts; but probably not to the "pop science" readers.

Furthermore, the lack of an actual citation was very disturbing, since if anybody did want to read the actual paper, they had to google for terms that would lead to basically incomprehensible search results.

The work was first posted to arxiv in 2012. It can take a while until a result is understood by enough experts to confirm its correctness. Imagine if journalists wrote an article claiming P=NP is closed every time someone posted their attempt to arxiv.

Also, this work very recently won a prestigious award.

Also, result published ---> result accepted ---> journalist writes high-quality piece explaining result to lay people can take years.

> the lack of an actual citation was very disturbing

The first linked text in the article is a link to the arxiv paper.

In Math usually the peer review time is very long. Perhaps one or one and half year (unless you are unlucky and when you contact the editor after a year he realizes that one of the referees "crashed" and must be "reseted").

In Physics people gets mad if the referees+editor take more than two months.

Each branch of science has its own typical time.

The article links to their journal publication from last year: http://www.ams.org/journals/jams/2016-29-01/S0894-0347-2015-...