I think both your comment and the reply by scrozart are hyperbolic. A particular person accruing perhaps undue historical acclaim in the popular press relative

I think both your comment and the reply by scrozart are hyperbolic. A particular person accruing perhaps undue historical acclaim in the popular press relative to the actual scope of their accomplishments happens all the time. In this case, yes, there's a lot of "wanting it to be true" involved because the tale of a black woman mathematician working in the 1960s makes for a heroic story of triumph over adversity. Per the "How Did It All Get Started?" section of the PDF it seems like the misconstrual of what happened began not as some kind of woke project in the last 10 years, but in the 1960s with the mathematician in question, proud of her accomplishments, inflating them beyond their real significance. And then the tale grew in the telling as the events receded in her memory.