The efficacy of applied NS was never in doubt. "Checking the box" is downplaying the magnitude of the discovery quite a bit as it has been unsolved for almost 100 years. Yes, this particular problem with NS no real-world applications, but that's true for 99.9% of math research.

There is no NS proof here. Its just a counter example. There is another team working on a proof but they aren't associated with OpenAI.