It's not that it makes the practice of breaking into computers that much more interesting so much as it makes the underlying field much more interesting to work in. The engineering problems just got a lot more complex. We're all taking an attack vector seriously --- microarchitectural side channels --- that we weren't taking as seriously before, except as an abstract threat to crypto and a way of defeating a mitigation --- KASLR --- that nobody believed in anyways.

What's glorious is that serious software security people now have to start being literate about what it means to reverse engineer and dump the branch history buffers on different CPUs. Getting dragged through this kind of minutiae is the reason I'm still in this field after 22 years.

And I'm just a bystander here. Imagine what it must have been like for Jann Horn over the last several months!

This subsection describes how we reverse-engineered the internals of the Haswell branch predictor. Some of this is written down from memory, since we didn't keep a detailed record of what we were doing.

... because shit was so crazy while they were working this out that they didn't have the cycles to write everything down!

Isn't that a bit like a firefighter saying your house burning down is "glorious"?