Social media attention perhaps? Mainstream media doesn't seem to have been paying much attention, and generally rather cautious over the whole thing.
Maybe but I doubt it's an intentional hoax. It's much more likely to be a mistake.
Definitely not. This definitely sounds like recency bias. I'll bet 9/10 of your non hacker / engineering family/friends don't even know what LK-99 is. I know thats the case for me at least.
Not a hoax but from memory a very premature announcement of results was that one from NASA about evidence of biological processes in a Mars rock.
First time I ever heard of it. A quick search and the majority of news articles are skeptical. Who hyped it?
To use a word like hoax would require at least some hint of the authors falsifying data or intentionally misrepresenting things. LK-99 is still very magnetically interesting even if it is not a superconductor. Interpreting those interesting behaviors is where things seem to have gone wrong.
In the late eighties, Fleischmann & Pons claimed to have invented room-temperature nuclear fusion. Now that was a media circus.
Nothing compared to cold fusion
That was my immediate thought too. That was an interesting time to be alive.