More than proof of concept if they went with such a statement to the press. Also, ongoing Phase 1/2 means that by 5-10 years this therapy may become commercial, the initial target being refractory/relapsing tumours as stated in the announcement. It may take some time for the therapeutic target population to be expanded, but this is not a minimal achievement.
My view is that this being an autologous therapy (the patient's very own leucocytes are being engineered: the entire manufacturing cycle [I speculate 30-50 days] is done for just a single patient), this will be very expensive and probably only covered on an insurance basis in certain countries only. Still better than nothing, and even science has to make money. The real breakthrough will be arriving to heterologous therapies, where healthy donors leucocytes can be engineered and administered to any patient.
After all there is a precedent, when Twitter decided to ban the former US President on its own account without any sort of court ruling mandating that. I don't agree with this move with regards to Turkey, but no one ever reflects on this?
More of them who were against this presumed sentiment of culture self defence, as you claim that in general there is no such thing (i.e. the majority of Italians don't care about it), should have voted the side they truly wanted, or should have gone and cast their vote instead of abstaining. But you may equally assume that they expressed their opinion in doing what they did well knowing what the outcome would be.
As far as preferring the use of local words - or made up words based on the current language - it's something you find in many other countries/languages other than the ones you mention. Or tell you more, some of their languages did not change for centuries thanks to or because of their prolific written tradition. Everything proves that English doesn't have to be present within every language.
I agree they could have just made a silent transition without making a bill and imposing fines, but in the end the decision doesn't sound very controversial to me.