My friend, who is a mathematician, sent this in our group chat:

The title is a bit misleading. The variant with a smooth forcing was one of the four valid variants in the Clay formulation. It is interesting to solve it. It is still an interesting and impressive result. The no force version is also interesting and remains unsolved. It isn’t reasonable to just dismiss the proof on the grounds that 26 years later we claim it was never that interesting. This is the first time I’ve seen this attitude.