I would guess that either the author at popular mechanics just found it / just dug it out of their reading list or one of the authors of the paper reached out as part of promoting their research?

I think a year ago as someone learning biology from Khan Academy and reading about endosymbiosis and reading what I could about LUCA theories with some chemistry background then whats written here just seems like a likely possibility. The paper doesn’t seem like strong evidence and it seems like there is a lot of guess work for early life. The teams making artificial cells are doing interesting, scary work there.

But I’m no expert here, I was just pointing out the source material and a summary