Computing is a huge subject, and there are many branches. For context, one branch, which I call "memory corruption studies", ever since the 1990s, is almost an entire research discipline with its own standing in infosec. As a result, entire OS concepts were invented to mitigate them (there even exists entire operating systems nearly dedicated to this this, such as OpenBSD and HardenedBSD), CPU hardware was literally modified to help mitigating them, new complier code generators were invented to mitigate them. Thousands of PhD degrees were awarded based studies on them. The research arm of every major tech firm has teams dedicated to them. There are infosec companies dedicated to this single subject.

In this context, practical data-only attacks as reported by this paper are the holy grail in this field.

As an outsider critic, you may say it's a side-effect of C/C++. If you use dynamic programming languages, this issue doesn't exist in your universe because there's no fundamental difference between code and data. But in another parallel universe of systems programming, it's a huge subject. Both the Morris worm and the publication of the article Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit in Phrack were regarded by many as the milestones of hacker culture and canonical models of hacking, all the exploitation and mitigation studies that followed it were partially motivated by new hackers who wanted to "advance the field of hacking", so any advancement would be considered significant by a hacker. This is Hacker News, and I thought most people would understand this background. But apparently many developers are application-focused nowadays and hack in different universes, and it's not the case.