The important part to keep in mind is that the paper is about the first word, and is not necessarily a partial history in the sense of incomplete, it's the partial which goes with impartial.

It's an interesting history. Personally I think sometimes what is pejoratively called gatekeeping is useful. Tellers comments go there: do experiments to see if we missed something but our prediction engine says this is unlikely.

The interest in LENR is not nothing, but it's mostly (as I see it) agenda setting for doing fundamental physics in LENR, not jumping to conception and testing of energy or neutron production systems. It's setting expectations for the scale of investment. Probably, because people remember getting burned by unrealistic expectations and science by PR and not by peer review, and yes, replication is part of this.

It's a paper in philosophy of science, science validation, science epistemics. It's not a paper about cold fusion per se.