I've only glanced through the article, I need to read it more carefully, but my first thought was here goes our fucking mission and my career plans before retirement...
Speculation about life on Venus is not anything new. There was an astrobiology paper about 20 years ago, which stated that the Venus clouds have ideal conditions for life in terms of temperature and chemistry (I believe it was published in Icarus). There were many other papers since. It seems like 30-40 years ago the prevailing opinion was that life doesn't exist anywhere but here, and that was replaced now with life can't be extinguished even in extremely harsh conditions. But the Venus one aspect is interesting. I was a part of a proposed NASA Discovery mission (SAGE) to Venus that lost to Osiris-Rex. That was a lander that was supposed to survive much longer than any of the Russian missions and explore the conditions in greater detail. That mission didn't materialize and as far as I know there are no serious plans for resurrection of a Venus Lander mission. Then I got involved with another Venus-related concept addressing the planetary formation science aspects through the abundance of the noble gases. It's still an idea under development, not yet a proposed mission, tentatively called Cupid's Arrow. The idea is to fly a small craft through the Venus atmosphere at ~100km altitude, collect a gas sample, remove all non-noble gases and measure the isotopic ratios of the noble ones. One of the concepts we are working on is a sample return (collect, return and analyze in a lab on Earth). That just got fucked up! If there is any potential for life on Venus, Planetary Protection will get involved and the return mission will be cost-prohibitive to us... We cannot currently design an in-situ analysis mission that can fit into the $50M cost cap... Ah well, unless something changes in the next year, I should rethink my retirement plans. I was hoping to get that Venus mission under my belt and fuck off somewhere in the boonies 10 years from now...
Having said that though, I'd be following these developments with great interest. There is a lot to be understood about the science, and even some of the lunar observations and theresulting conclusions are unproven beyond doubt and could easily be wrong. So, the paper needs to pass scrutiny from all angles. I'm mostly thinking of exotic catalytic processes that do not occur on Earth and are therefore unknown.