Nobody mentioned any of this. There are several tools commonly used for communications within the scientific community, including peer-reviewed articles, letters, preprints, and conferences. It’s hardly controversial.
Well, it's important to keep this all in context: They did not want to release the paper, even as a preprint, at this point. The infighting in the group necessitated it when someone went off script and threw up the original shoddy paper, forcing them to release their marginally better one.
They had sent out some samples prior to this whole debacle, including to KENTECH (a Korean university focusing on energy technology), but are waiting to send out more samples specifically because they want to get a peer-reviewed article out there before they start sending them out to a broader audience.
I'm not saying LK-99 is a RTAPS, and current evidence seems to indicate it is almost certainly not one, but the broader LK-99 team seems to have been attempting to follow the normal process the whole time.