I'm pretty sure that most people that have a basic idea of materials science were simply intrigued (myself amongst them) because there wasn't anything that ruled it out and it seemed like a potentially promising path. And obviously: the truth would come out anyway given enough time. The HN threads of the time make for interesting reading: I think a lot of people approach technological progress from the point of something very close to wishful thinking, their enthusiasm isn't proportional to the likelihood of the thing being true but to the perceived good a particular invention would do if it were real. And that then overwhelms any kind of reasoning ability. Incidentally: that may well be as good an answer as I can provide to the original question posed by this article.

Some did, but not everybody did. I recall those threads vividly and I tried very hard to keep an even keel and to keep it all grounded in evidence. But a lot of wishful thinking happened as well as categorical rejection and these had the same element in common: a lack of evidence. Though the categorical rejection faction had history on their side I still think that that's just an argument from statistics without any relevant insight in to the subject matter.