I won't say too much about this, but the amount of buzz around articles these days is more of "research today" sort of thing. Top conferences like CVPR receives thousands of submissions each year, and there's a lot of upside to getting your work in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

By no means do I claim that SMERF is the be-all-end-all in real-time rendering, but I do believe it's a sold step in the right direction. There are all kinds of ways to improve this work and others in the field: smaller representation sizes, faster training, higher quality, and fewer input images would all make this technology more accessible.