It's funny, this is like a how many engineers does it take joke.

The whole point in finding a room temperature super conductor is that it's difficult to maintain those low temperatures in practice. So if we want to put super conductors in practice, we need to figure out how to do it a different, more practical way. 40x the pressure needed to make diamonds doesn't seem practical. Maybe there is some material property magic like thermal quenching or tempering that could allow for a final product that has those kind of internal pressures in a steady state object.

You see this everywhere in the engineering world. I'm not saying this particular work will not lead somewhere, just that it is an example of a broader challenge I've seen in engineering, bridging the gap between practical every day use and research.

I think you see it everywhere because you essentially described exploratory science vs engineering. First humans understand how the physical world behaves, then they see if that knowledge is usable.

Apparently we can get to 20GPa with strained silicon (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1501382). Diamond can theoretically get to 225 GPa (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13378-w). Maybe cubic boron nitride.