ad 3) If the claim of Chomsky (followers) is that you can only learn human language if you have the universal grammar, then the discovery of a system that learns human languages without such a grammar does seem like rather relevant to the discussion
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It's completely irrelevant, as he points out LLMs can learn any "language" even ones that humans can't, so therefore it doesn't tell you anything about humans.
A related argument is that you can predict the weather using a neural net but that doesn't mean that the weather works like a neural network and it doesn't tell you anything about how weather does work.
That isn't the claim.
But many people did believe that. From the article,
> I personally remember very heated arguments on the MIT campus between Chomsky followers and computer scientists working on statistical models in the early 2000’s. The arguments came up in computer science faculty hiring meetings. The Chomskians claimed that because of the need for universal grammar there would never be anything useful that came out of statistical approaches to language. ChatGPT has proved them wrong. (And yes, I personally shouted angrily at Chomskians in some of those hiring meetings.)
Chomsky himself never said that, he said that it wouldn't produce anything useful for understanding how language works in humans.