I can’t answer your question specifically, I’m not up to date on the latest developments. But I do think it’s worth mentioning, generally speaking, that light is harder to deal with than electricity. It requires bigger structures and those structures are inherently lossy. I think the issue has always been related to signal deterioration as the light propagates and the inability to “store” light, like how you can store a charge. This is a fundamental problem with using light and I wouldn’t expect some new engineering effort to overcome it. Speaking as an optical engineer.