The breakthrough isn’t things moving faster but more fibers per cable.
No, it's actually more cores per fiber, and using those very well for space division multiplexing on top of the normal wavelength division multiplexing. They are talking about 22.9 Pb/s per fiber, not cable, the Tom's Hardware article is just wrong.
Cables can already contain hundreds of fibers, for example 576 here or into the thousands if you use stacks of ribbon cables in the subunits, for example 3456 here
Yes, thanks to all for contributing and assisting. I am grateful for the clarification and leg work. Folks say reddit had this, and lemmy has less, so every time I see it, I make sure to appreciate it.