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According to the abstract of the paper referred to in the article (https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10935) it rests on a "central conjecture in the area of network coding". Make of that what you will.
Conjectures aren't doing so hot in this area, it seems.
For that one counter-example how many conjectures turned out to be true?
>In this work, we prove that if a central conjecture in the area of network coding is true, then any constant degree boolean circuit for multiplication must have size Ω(nlgn), thus almost completely settling the complexity of multiplication circuits
So, given an unproven assumption and also given that we are constrained to doing multiplication on a boolean circuit, this may be "perfect" in a sense.
Seems like the title is mostly just clickbait.