If you smell wood smoke your fireplace is either not an efficient design or you are burning the wood wrong. A modern efficient fireplace with a catalytic converter does a really good job at converting wood to heat.
And the article makes no mention of catalytic wood stoves, which drives me nuts because I thought pretty much all the recent ones included at least an option for a catalyst.
Does a wood-stove catalytic converter help with PM2.5? That seemed to be the main focus of the article.
It burns hotter which means it does a better job at combustion. I'd imagine the PM2.5 is much lower for a hotter fire.
Note that catalytic convertors are not strictly necessar. Plenty of EPA-approved designs use other mechanisms to achieve the same result: