Probably doesn’t help that every consecutive year of physics education is like “anyway everything we taught you last year is a simplification that’s technically wrong. Here’s how it really works now that you know enough math to understand the next level”
It’s basically chaff, lol. We’ve known chaff is an effective radar countermeasure since the 40s, and it seems like the researchers have found the lidar and optical equivalents of chaff. What really scares me is the idea of this evolving into more sophisticated deception attacks like range or velocity gate pulls. No idea how you’d do that with lidar or optically, but I’d bet money that’s a line item on a black budget somewhere