I'm sure you're much more knowledgeable about this than I am, but that's kind of my point. A month old preprint is the first thing to compare to implementations of a mildly evolved, warty old standard from 40 years ago. I consider that fantastic.
Thanks for the paper though. Looking forward to reading it more closely when I have time.
Absolutely! IEEE floats are ubiquitous in software and hardware. I bet good money they will still be around 40 more years into the future :) and any alternative has to fight their ubiquity.
Better alternatives have been proposed for a long time though. Posits are very nice, and even they are almost 10 years old now :p