> If true, that is objectively insane.
I dunno about that. Look at it this way: we don't know how to make a room temp superconductor, we don't know how to learn what we need to learn to make one. There were some more obvious ideas, they didn't work. There were a lot of less obvious ideas, lots of people tried them, they didn't work.
At this point, one could argue that continued research specifically directed to making a room temp superconductor, absent some kind of new externally originated discovery or a constraint relaxation (like ultra high pressure), is objectively a waste of time.
So we should also expect that the discovery will either be a bit insane or will be a totally unexpected accident from unrelated work (why are my results weird? oh this drug I was testing turned out to be a superconductor!)-- and maybe a combination. Perhaps it turns out that the LK-99 sample is superconducting but due to some accidental impurity in their synthesis, for reasons totally unrelated to their expectations, perhaps one that would have been discovered before but most people making new ceramics aren't testing them for superconductivity.
The sane people are busy making discoveries that if not quite guaranteed are at least in domains where many people haven't already failed.