I had to look up woo woo on wikipedia where it's said to be "a term used by magician and skeptic James Randi to denote paranormal, supernatural and occult claims". I see no such claims in BlockReduce :-)

The proposal basically deals with the bandwidth problem of on-chain scaling, trading it off against trust that miners are doing the proper cross-shard checks that they're supposed and incentivized to. What it fails to do making the whole chain fully verifiable by a typical desktop computer, as should be apparent from "the total chain will require around 8 Tb/year of storage".

I don't see these tradeoffs as being acceptable to the Bitcoin community, but they might appeal to the Ethereum community.