[Someone]

> making the substance in the article weaker.

Less hard, to be more precise [1]. “Strong” and “weak” are way imprecise terms in engineering.

The simplest example is whether it’s strong under pressure (a brick is, a rope isn’t) or under tension (a rope is, a brick isn’t), but there are tons of other properties that are an indicator of strength of a material (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_of_materials), and this may beat diamond in some of them.

Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_diamond, diamond isn’t particularly tough, and we don’t really know its tensile strength, so this is less hard, but may have higher toughness or higher tensile strength.

[1] reading Wikipedia, even that isn’t simple: “There are three main types of hardness measurements: scratch, indentation, and rebound. Within each of these classes of measurement there are individual measurement scales. For practical reasons conversion tables are used to convert between one scale and another.”