The system is quite complex and full of exotic objects, so ordinary real world intuition is a poor guide. And the laws are couched in a mathematical language that is also foreign to our everyday world.
Yet, predictions can be made and tested. It's an intellectual puzzle like "what does this very tight loop do?", or "how does the Y combinator work?" -- but in a different arena.
Now, as a full-time software engineer and part time jack of all trades, I appreciate stuff like this experiment and the work of Space X and others much as I appreciate good engineering. It's a difficult problem to solve. So many disciplines had to cooperate to grant us some small insight into the inner workings of our universe. It's marvelous, and makes me feel like a kid again.
We (as in, species) just observed a phenomenon that's related on a fundamental way to any form of matter, doesn't matter(no pun intended) if it is space or not.