The only reason Caltech is doing this is that a really rich person with delusions gave them 100 million dollars to research space based solar power. They know as well as anyone with a bit of RF experience that what they're doing isn't really increasing the TRL of space based solar power transmission. It's just humoring the donor for the money.
The best that can be said is that it's the first flex pcb RF system in orbit. That's kind of cool but as a person looking to be inspired and improve things it seems like a significant waste of money. It's not like high power RF transmitters haven't been tested in vacuum in LEO before. There have been many, many radar satellites.
They should've been spending they $100 million attempting to make coherent kilometer scale transmitting apertures on Earth and actually demo something that'd prove the feasibility of space based solar power transmission.
I'm not sure you understand how the world works. You don't get to decide how institutions spend money that is donated to them, and I really don't know why you think you do.
Where people post inspiring and interesting things we can learn from, we can aspire to and maybe even improve some things from time to time.
There's no need for all the negativity every time someone tries something new. It serves no purpose.