Comment by masklinn
I would assume the mask only covers the damaged areas. This means it replaces manual retouching, so you still need to clean the original painting and remove the varnish in order to get at the original colors, and as part of the usual cleanups (removal of old conservation, stabilisation, infill). The article specifically says that the film is adhered to and via a varnish layer.
Makes me wonder how it would handle heavy impasto tho.
Obviously it can't handle heavy impasto. With heavy impasto, people usually literally sculp the surface using some material to math the rest of the painting and then paint on top of this. Even with minimal impasto, they will often try to mimic the texture by imprinting various tools into the material, mimicking for example brushes used by the original author. This printing method can't do this at all, and the filter might struggle when the painting is too uneven.
Otherwise this might be an interesting technique, if the result can match the color and texture of paint perfectly. I can see it being used for some low priority paintings. There are much more paintinga that need restoration than people with necessary skills, so this could save of them, as it will be more viable to fix them. The infilling is usually just a small part of the entire process, but usually the most difficult wrt how skillful the conservator must be. You must be able to match colors and style perfectly, and there are huge differences in how fast this process is depending on the skills of the painter.