If you read the article it basically says "not really directly". > "It might seem that reversing a sprinkler is not of much practical interest, admits Ristroph

If you read the article it basically says "not really directly". > "It might seem that reversing a sprinkler is not of much practical interest, admits Ristroph, “since we don’t need to ‘unwater’ our lawns.” But he says that there are applications in fluid mechanics in which it is important to be able to precisely control flows ejected from devices and to understand how this process modifies the forces they experience, for example, in technologies that harvest energy from flowing air or water." This is a problem that gets into the noise of a system and isn't directly "first principals", but your intuition by the fact this has been around for decades and was spawned from a though experiment should tell you that this wasn't particularly high priority to solve in the first place. It is an interesting academic thing to ponder, though.