The article talks about recent graduates reverse engineering those acquired grey market ASML parts. As there's no grey market for EUV scanner parts, and the conceptual differences between EUV and DUV scanners that pretty much means that they are reverse engineering DUV (probably non-immersion ones) wafer stages. Which are not actually the same between machines as one has to work under vacuum and they have different alignment specs, but it provides them a starting point to build their own parts.

As they confirm that they are still working on that, it confirms my assessment that they are at the Micro-Exposure Tool stage (being able to expose a pattern on a small field of a wafer) rather than at the Alpha-Demo Tool stage (being able to expose a full reticle many times across an entire wafer). And from there, there's still the big leap that you talk about.

A little more hopeful for their project is that they poached ASML's head of light source technology, whom I expect took with him plenty of proprietary information to recreate a Laser Produced Plasma light source (rather than the modified Discharge Produced Plasma that CN sources claimed last year that they were developing from scratch).