As a programmer, I already went through the "woah, my whole career path is about to fundamentally change" moment when I first got to toy around with ChatGPT earlier this year. Maybe everyone's going to get a turn at that. :)
Back when the Em drive had its brush with reproducibility a few years ago I thought one of the most fun side effects would be that the crackpot garage tinkerers would have scored a major feather in their caps and everyone would be paying a lot more attention to their crackpottery going forward. These LK-99 developers are quite a few steps above garage-tinkerers, but they're still far from respected members of some major institution somewhere so perhaps we'll get a similar flourishing of interest in off-the-beaten-path theories should this turn out to be a real discovery.