traced the origins of the virus [...] to bat populations in northern Laos and southwest China’s Yunnan province

Both 'lab leak' hypotheses (China & US) alleged that the escaped virus, before being edited, was sourced from bats in southwest China, so I don't understand how this changes anything really.

Look at this New Yorker article from five years ago, for example:

the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 are known to have existed in [...] bat caves in Yunnan

In fact, there was a DARPA contract that said "we're gonna take bat coronaviruses from Yunnan and edit them".

Two of the biggest indicators of lab-manipulation, according to Jeffrey Sachs and others, is the presence of the furin cleavage site and atypical codons in its genome for a particular amino acid (don't remember which one it is rn). Apparently, those features are common in virology lab work but practically nonexistent in wild betacoronaviruses. If this study had found those features in the nearest ancestor, then my interest might be piqued.

The DARPA proposal stated that scientists would introduce furin cleavage sites into lab-created versions of SARS-related coronaviruses, recovered from bats in Yunnan.

A truly compelling discovery would involve finding, in the wild, the exact genome that was first discovered in human patients (or a few base pairs removed). That may sound like an unreasonably high bar of evidence, but, if I'm not mistaken, precisely that has been done for the first SARS virus and also a previous pandemic^[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4542197/] caused by a lab leak, so it really isn't.

Edit: There is also the serologic antibody evidence cited by China suggesting the virus was in the US first, which is only consistent with the Maryland lab leak hypothesis. Funnily enough, Jeffrey Sachs is ignorant of this; he believes it leaked from the Wuhan lab, but he recognizes that the virology work there was being done at the behest of DARPA and originated with Ralph Baric in North Carolina, and so he rightfully blames the US in that scenario.

Edit2: Leaked emails revealed USAMRIID scientists saying to each other "oh shit, this SARS-2 thing looks like a lab-made virus WTF!?" Weeks later the same scientists published a paper arguing that it was obviously natural and it was silly to think otherwise.