This certainly could be part of the motivation for publishing it this way, to make themselves more noticed by the big players. Btw, publishing in open source nature is expensive, it’s like 6-8000 euro for the big ones, so there definitely is a reason.
While in not in the field either, I do know that it is quite unusual in computer science academics to publish in actual peer reviewed journals. This is because it can be a long process, and the field is very fast moving, so your results would be outdated by the time you publish. Thus, a paper is typically synonymous with a conference proceeding, and can be found on arxiv. I found this Paper on the arxiv from 2017/2018 which seems to be when this paper was originally published for the scientific community and presented at a very “good” (if I had to guess) conference. Google scholar says this paper has 650 citations, so it probably has had quite some impact. However, I would guess this method is well known and is already implemented in many models, if it was truly disruptive.
The article linked here is rubbish, CrSBr is not a meta material and also not a superconductor. It is a layered semiconductor. However, the Nature article they link to is quite interesting. The background is in cavity engineering, which is where one tries to modify intrinsic material properties by coupling to light “strongly”. This is usually done by creating a cavity (think two opposing mirrors around the material) and have light bounce back and forth.
Here instead they don’t need to use mirrors, but the refractive index is different enough to trap light in the material, and the electronic properties seem to be quite sensitive to the light because the magnetic phase is sensitive to magnetic fields and the different magnetic phases have quite different electronic properties. So all in all they find a strong light-matter coupling but only below 132K (the critical temperature of the magnetic phase).
Thought I would mention Guix. I don’t know about using it as an OS but just the package manager is so nice to build reproducible software environments (although disclaimer I discovered this myself a few weeks ago). At least as close you can get without including proprietary hardware drivers. Building MPI applications on my laptop and moving them to an HPC cluster with full performance feels like magic.