if you look at the pictures captured with it, it does create gaps / lines. at the end of: https://www.flickr.com/photos/slaclab/albums/721577137971034...

The same reason you can see perfectly out of sunglasses with mesh lenses - basically light behaves like a wave so small gaps have little to no effect.

That’s not the same though. The sunglasses are in front of my eyes. If you put that mesh on my retina, I’m gonna see lines (if by some miracle my eyes still work)

uh. are they doing some kind of bizarre imaging with micro-lenses at the array and offsetting the focal plain? -- because otherwise it doesn't. Gaps are missing pixels.

Presumably for astronomical applications they don't matter.

Usually it's gotten around because astronomical images are stacks of many integrations, and then you dither around. If you take 10 5-minute exposures, for example, and you dither around correctly, you might have a bunch of pixels with 9/10 or 8/10 data values... then you stack the images and weight those pixels accordingly.