I don't read any of the papers because there is basically no way to re-implement them or independently verify them. People can feel shocked, surprised, amazed or enlightened all they want while reading the paper but in truth people still have no idea how any of this truly work.

Before at least you had a mathematical model to work with which shows that even at small-scale this idea can lead to something that work as promised on a larger-scale ML model.

Nowadays OpenAI can claim that Jesus came back and cleaned the data for their model and we would actually have no way to actually verify the veracity of this claim.