Even if LK-99 does turn out to be a room-temperature superconductor, significant challenges around manufacturing and engineering would remain before it could be utilized in real-world applications.
This part seems irrelevant for this story. Of course there are going to be challenges and unknowns about taking a lab experiment to mass scale production. That is true of literally every thing that may eventually become mass produced.
What's interesting about LK-99 is not whether this particular room temperature superconductor would be useful. It's about proving that any such material is possible to exist. That would ignite a huge effort to discover why, which will lead to the development of other, better materials. Some of which will be scalable and affordable, most likely, given enough research time.
But until we know it's possible, why spend all of that effort? The first discovery on the edges of science are almost always most important as a signal that research is headed in the right general direction.