I absolutely agree that lots of 'inspiring' disability coverage seems hostile and dehumanizing, celebrating changes that make disability invisible rather than those that help people. But a lot of social-model reactions to that actually give me the same feeling of being more worried about social perceptions than individual well-being. I'm sure this is influenced by my personal and first-hand experiences, which have mostly been about disabilities that produce pain or limited autonomy, without much in the way of support from design or devices. From that starting point, I'm hesitant to go too far down the road of prioritizing acceptance and accommodation over treatment; for some things there's just not much to be done outside of lessening pain or increasing function.

As far as medical devices, I'm entirely on board with you. There's an overwhelming trend towards solutionism, promoting high-tech tools of dubious merit (or amateur replacements for quality devices) rather than focusing on the cost, reliability, and usability of basic tools. And realistically, a lot of those high-tech tools seem focused on decreasing the visibility and social impact of disability rather than improving quality of life for disabled people: a stair-climbing wheelchair could offer some value to the users, but it largely sounds convenient for the people who no longer have to worry about accommodating ramps, lifts, or stair chairs. Adapting environments to devices is often more robust and cheaper than the reverse, but it provokes a lot more negativity.

But I'm a bit surprised to see this response on this story; surgical advances generally strike me as something with far more long-term potential and more patient focus than gimmicky new devices. A 'breakthrough' new wheelchair is quite likely to have insurmountable limitations, but breakthrough new surgeries often develop into reliable and commonplace treatments. As far as this specific work, the functional limitations improved from "no measurable grasp strength at all" pre-surgery to "enough grasp strength for most everyday tasks", which seems like a major and straightforward improvement. Autonomic dysfunction presumably didn't improve, but this surgery is being studied as an alternative to tendon transfers, which doesn't provide that either. Pain data appears to be in the study's full text, which I don't have access to, but several common and painful issues tendon transfers were avoided. Further, the treatment appears to already be competitive with or cheaper than other options, so it might become covered quite quickly - if not in the USA's insane system, then at least under national health plans. Most interesting to me, patients in the study were offered 'mixed' treatment of tendon transfer in one hand and nerve transfer in the other. By their self-report, they preferred the resulting adaptability to either treatment on its own.

There are certainly ways medicine and society handles this sort of advance poorly, like focusing on numerical outcomes without prioritizing (or even asking) the views of the disabled person, or pressuring people to accept risky or painful treatments to decrease their care needs. But I very much don't see that in evidence here; the study was specifically designed to obtain subjective feedback from the patients, and the researchers choose to close their remarks not on celebrating a technical result but on emphasizing the importance of societal support and patient decision-making. I didn't get "heartwarming" from this but "cautiously optimistic". The lack of accounts from patients is unfortunate, but to my knowledge that's often (in stories about research) a function of privacy and ethics rules rather than disinterest in those voices.