> The article talks not just about Zhang, but also about James Maynard, who is a postdoc and looks young, and is part of what you might call standard academia. His result is independent of Zhang's and is orders of magnitude stronger and is much easier to understand.

Maynard has done some stellar work to be sure, but he built off of Zhang's breakthrough. Maynard's result is one of a sequence of very quick findings all happening in just months after Zhang's work became public, all make possible by that work, and relatively easy, as can be seen from their number and rapid pace.

I have not read all the papers here, but my guess is that Zhang's result is hugely more impressive.