The paper itself is behind a paywall so I can't see it, but it looks from the references like they provided proper attribution.
It's unfortunate that some of the articles around it don't mention that, but it seems like the main point of this is discussing the process for building the transistors, and then showing that can be used to build a complete CPU, not the CPU design itself which they just used an off-the-shelf open source one, which is designed to use a very small number of gates.
The paper itself is behind a paywall so I can't see it, but it looks from the references like they provided proper attribution.
It's unfortunate that some of the articles around it don't mention that, but it seems like the main point of this is discussing the process for building the transistors, and then showing that can be used to build a complete CPU, not the CPU design itself which they just used an off-the-shelf open source one, which is designed to use a very small number of gates.