Wheeler’s delayed choice excitement is referred to as a thought expirement both by the physicists in the article as well as the first line in its Wikipedia entry. Like Einstein, he worked through many thought excitements that suggested an outcome, but couldn’t be tested at the time. However, many of Einstein’s proposed experiments that have since been observed are still referred to as his thought expiriments.
We may be saying the same thing, but worth making the distinction.
For the other poster (diggsey), it will be difficult to answer your question about the novelty of these newly run expiriments without a full read of the article.
And as this article shows, the Wheeler experiments are not thought experiments, they are very real ones.