"Wouldn't a working approach be to just create a really low resolution 3D world in the traditional "3D game world" sense to get the spatial consistency. Then this crude map with attributes is fed into frame generation to create the resulting world?"

That's Minecraft. It does work. And when you turn around, then turn back to where you were facing, you don't feel like you're in a fever dream, because the landscape hasn't completely shifted.

The tech is neat and I'm sure worth publishing. The rhetoric accompanying it is terribly overblown. Of course that's as likely to be their University PR department as the authors.