So is there any way to actually read it? Or do i have to buy an obscure french book? can you even buy the book? Academic publishing/gatekeeping is such a joke.

It's in the picture, I presume. Just gotta brush up on that Koine Greek. Or if you read Egyptian hieroglyphs already, you can use the Rosetta Stone to reconstruct the Koine Greek from first principles.

I'm hoping in these verses Empedocles complains about crappy copper from a Babylonian merchant.

This feels like a knee-jerk reaction. While it may be a relevant critique of some news releases about academic research… this one literally contains a thumbnail with a link to a sufficiently-high-resolution image of the document. You can read it by clicking on the only image in the article.

494 B.C.? Empedocles’ll DMCA you if you post them!

It will probably be processed into an edited edition and then published as a book.

I mean, it's still a pretty cool discovery.