The article makes it sounds like this somehow counters the criticism of the Hyperloop, but all the criticism I saw was of the cost estimates of the infrastructure, the utility of a route with the proposed termini, and the idea that a paper concept with no demonstrated prototype was a serious near-term alternative to high speed rail, while the issues this addresses is the basic viability of the "pod in a tube" mechanism (which it says is basically sound in outline -- but needs to be done in a different way than actually proposed in Musk's paper.)

So, it's basically a validation that the part was least criticized is probably basically viable in some form, though perhaps not the actual form proposed by Musk.

(And the one part of the pod-in-tube engineering that was seriously criticized -- the proposed mechanism for addressing thermal expansion over long stretches -- is also not addressed by this discussion.)