I did eventually find that yes, after sifting through the rest of the useless links, the quantamagazine article that says jack shit, the link to the ACM symposium call for submissions (lmao). Like come on, why label that "underlying research"?

And all of that was wasted time since it seems that this just isn't at all applicable to A* heuristics the way Dijkstra's is. It's only an improvement in a very specific case.