>Answer: It slowed down the metabolism of the cell. It was lethal.
>"When the stress is relieved, the tardigrade gels dissolve, and the human cells return to their normal metabolism," says University of Wyoming molecular biologist Thomas Boothby.
The slowing of cell metabolism is lethal. The fact you can restore individual cells to something close to "normal" at a later time, doesn't help. Your patient is dead and the cells eventually die anyway.
I am not convinced that the "normal" metabolism of the cell, afterward, is anything other than metabolic collapse.
But nobody was suggesting doing to this to an entire human. Pointing out that doing this would be lethal is a strawman. It's just research to move our understanding of how this works forwards a bit.
Some possible future applications that could arise from much more research were preserving tissue for organ transplants, or maybe in slowing down aging. But not using the current technique.