or just do some fun hacking that doesn't have you at the location of the hack

For the length of time this article covered you would need a power source and to not have your box discovered for months. Probably something out on the street isn't going to fulfill both of those requirements so you'd be trying to enter "Enterprise A" which is unlikely given the presumed elevated security profile this article implies (any guesses who?). With what they pulled off the "box" that ended up being used was something already plugged in next door and very much supposed to be there. Seems easier than any physical attack would have been.

Reusing existing digital compromise toolkits on a presumably far less hardened targets across the street is far easier than trying to deploy hardware thousands of miles away.

The timeline here for the entire sequence of events is 1-2 weeks.

It was pretty easy to do without buying the box if you had a network card you could put into monitor mode. Fun thing was that you only needed one handshake initially, then you could replay it and collect the responses which were each initialized differently.

I've tried the WPA equivalent attack (capture handshake, crack offline...) against targets with physical security that extended beyond their wifi. It was a bit arduous and fiddly and expensive and risky. If I could've compromised a neighbor and gotten the handshakes without traveling for them I'd definitely have preferred that option.