While you're right, they definitely talked about doing simple stimulation via a control in the article (They mention they had people lined up to do that in the

While you're right, they definitely talked about doing simple stimulation via a control in the article (They mention they had people lined up to do that in the article - I do recognize that's different then the headline.) I'm guessing this patient has more of a partial spinal cord injury (So the spinal cord itself was still intact). Stimulation may have then allowed weaker signals to make it all the way though. This is definitely a big deal, but it won't work for every patient. One of the biggest challenges in the area of brain-controlled movement is that brains are so unique to everybody, and stimulating the spinal-cord directly is hard to do without accidentally stimulating other parts of the body (In general, stimulators are past the spinal cord and closer to the appendage they're going to move. Implants for the hand are usually located in the shoulder, and stimulate the nerve going off of the spinal-cord for example). If someone has a completely severed spinal cord, this technique won't make a bridge for the signal so it's not going to be a fix-all type of thing (Though, I'd be happy to be wrong!).