>Physicists have taken this to mean that the contorted space-time fabric of a black hole may be made of atomlike parts, just like a gas.

as far as i see the "singularity" at the center of black hole is just a mathematical artifact of the smoothness of the GR. And while that smoothness is a valid approximation at macro scales, by all the accounts the world isn't that smooth at the micro scales, and similarly to white dwarfs and neutron stars it seems naturally for a black hole core to be some next step of degenerate matter, something like quark-gluon soup.

In the article they describe a 2D wrapper that can represent 3D objects in the 3D bulk space between it with mathematical equivalence. Can we not extrapolate this to mean that it is possible our 3D universe encapsulates a 4D bulk space?

Is any of this experimentally falsifiable? Or rather, where downstream of this does something experimentally falsifiable pop out?

I think this should be retitled to specify it's a story about the key players or the history of this subject, not so much subject matter itself.

Often I click something related to Quanta and it seems to occupy a very strange target audience. It starts with a title or link that seems lures a reader with in-depth knowledge of some subjects. I think most readers see that title and get excited about all kinds of things like a simplified introduction to subjects they weren't able to grasp in the past or someones unique perspective that might help them better understand the topic.

Instead the article is actually the story and history of some people involved. That's an interesting article as well, but I think it's a different title.