For those who check the comments first: Not clickbait. Title is literally accurate.
The title and the article seem to be essentially accurate but are written in a breathless "we'll make this math stuff exciting, darn it" tone that some might like but which, as a math person, I find somewhat grating.
I think science/math writing of twenty or forty years ago was still reasonably effective and with that, we could get-by with a headline such as "A impressive result in the combinatorics field that uses the 'polynomial method'"
Edit: I appreciate that quantamagazine.org is doing a bunch of math articles. But we gotta admit it's injecting about every bit of "this is simply amaaaazing" rhetoric it can muster, which detracts somewhat from at least my enjoyment of it and actually it a harder to figure what's happening (from MA-level perspective).
I guess there's some risk that many of these stories fall into similar patterns (something was hard and mathematicians worked on it for a long time, they didn't expect it to be solved soon, now it's been solved solved and people are impressed and see various applications), but it's nice to see the details and hear from some people in the field in their own words.
I feel like Klarreich tends to give more details than Gardner did when writing about current research; maybe that partly has to do with the web form, because she can include links to the actual papers and supplementary materials. It's also a nice counterpoint to the enthusiasm that her articles convey because the applications and consequences are specific; it's not like journalism that says "maybe now we'll get a pony/interstellar spaceflight/spooky quantum communications/faster computers!" without really showing how the discovery is going to enable that.
The fact is that mathematicians are excited by unexpected progress in math research, so hopefully other people can be too! :-)
Example: Clickbait headline: "This underdog just won a major political office!" Regular headline: "Truman defeats Dewey"