So as some other comments say, we discovered that this reaction was a thing at all! Once you put everything together, it happens very simply, in an easy setup,

So as some other comments say, we discovered that this reaction was a thing at all! Once you put everything together, it happens very simply, in an easy setup, but no one had put together this setup because it's so unlikely and, according to old chemical knowledge, impossible. It's hard to describe just how much this goes against the grain of 100 years of chemical history, which all tell us that precious (transition) metal catalysts are absolutely necessary for these types of seemingly difficult transformations. This is like - to make a complicated pastry with layers and bubbles and flakes, it's a crazy bakery process, right, complicated and most people can't do it. But what if I told you to make the most complicated pastry, all you had to do was add salt and stir it up in a big bowl and poof - your pastry would be there? You'd laugh at me and say I didn't know anything about pastry-making. The thing is, in this case, it's right - a potassium salt can indeed do this, which goes against this big assumption that chemists have been making for a very long time: that transition metal catalysts (the middle block of the periodic table) are the ONLY things that can do this type of chemistry. So to answer your last question, the key new idea is "earth-abundant catalysis" - or the fact that we can do these complicated reactions with very, very simple, cheap, and common reagents - maybe the way that Nature itself does chemistry!