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Well known before this work as that some kind of balancing system is useful, and the different types of balancing systems, either simple switched shunt resistors or DC to DC converters, have different capabilities. What this introduces is a sophisticated optimization that can compute the ideal operation of that balancing system during charging. And not at all surprising, that is shown to be better than simply putting the same current in all the cells. What I didn't find in the quick reading of the article is how much advantage there is in using this optimal approach versus using a common sense ad hoc method.

I think that the key here is that even though active balancing using dc-dc converters has been proposed by many people, it has rarely been implemented because it costs more than the simple switched shunt resistor approach. If the model was used to clearly show the advantages of better hardware, that could motivate people to make use of it.

What kind of incentives would car manufacturers have to increase the amount of charge cycles of battery packs in EV's?

Long term reputation, cost, which is taken into account by potential buyers. Sooner than later people will be able to check which battery techs are more reliable than others and choose the car based on that.

But in the end all batteries fail and getting it replaced is incredibly expensive to the point that by then the resale value hurts the viability of replacing the battery.

That's partially true, it really depends. If customers and governments allow car manufacturers to abuse the market then this will happen. If governments create incentives and a legal ground for manufacturers to behave, it won't happen.

Cars could have much longer lifespans since they don't have too many moving parts and battery is the single most important point of failure that matters long term.

Right now globally most car manufacturers already succeeded in making repairs to their product a franchise deal, with proprietary connectors and software that locks the car down over minor issues. I don't have any faith that consumers will be able to hold back the obvious issues we're going to see in a couple of years when EV's are no longer mostly leased and batteries run out.