Can someone with knowledge comment if charging a battery this way will significantly decrease its longevity? I remember reading that charging with a low current is advisable to preserve battery health.
According to the article: Its latest refrigerant cooling system helps deliver a 35 percent gain in high-temperature lifespan, ensuring that megawatt charging won’t degrade the battery.
Recharging is at some level an issue with current delivery, not just the chemistry. EV batteries are massive arrays of individual cells, so a lot of recharging problems is having the wiring to deliver the current to the batteries optimally.
Then, some chemistries/designs have better cycle endurance, some can probably recharge faster at given depletion levels. When charging an almost totally discharged battery, there's lots of "slots" for the incoming charge to fill, but as it fills up, it will inevitably take more time to locate a "slot" to occupy.
Solid state and semi-solid state may be at play here, since a solid state battery is theoretically more durable as well.
Or, to your point, it is a marketing stunt that doesn't care about cycle endurance. How would we tell? Battery reporting is still horrendous at delineating the tradeoffs/limitations per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930 but hoping that mainstream media don't "gee whiz" science and technology reporting is simply not going to happen, especially in the clickbait era.
A good rule of thumbs with most battery chemistries is that they tend to not like both extremes. This is true for temperature, charge capacity, slightly less true for charging current as very low current tend not to degrade the battery.