It seems clear that this paper (and many papers like it that try to produce higher level abstractions casting one field’s concepts into theorems of some other field) is only meant for that 1% you mention. In fact this is why I don’t get excited about these sorts of results. For people outside the main fields, it ends up sounding like some dramatic philosophical discovery, but for people in the field it’s borderline meaningless. If you play around with definitions long enough, you can always find some notion of X that looks like “equilibrium” or “convergence” or “entropy” or “orthogonality” or some decomposition or some transformation for some other concept Y. Finding these results is almost always just about rejiggering definitions so that something mundane can be reinterpreted as something significant “in the right space.”