As a retired scientist and geneticist, I can almost guarantee the dire wolf and woolly mammoth targets boil down to funding.
So, this advance is a sort of proof-of-concept, like Dolly the sheep. Before Dolly, back in the late eighties, "we" cloned frogs. People thought mammals would be too difficult, too complex, but we got there and the ability to clone mammals, IIRC, pointed to abilities to create new therapeutics. Cancer treatments and such. Money.
It was less that anyone wanted a cloned sheep and more that it was a proof of concept.
So while it's true that the DNA in a fossilized dire wolf bone is far too degraded (for our current tech) to simply clone, the sequence of that DNA can be stitched together in silico and analyzed alongside grey wolf DNA (etc) to gain insight into evolutionary changes, genetic bases for adaptation to life thousands of years ago, and so on. From there, the possibility of engineering something similar to a dire wolf is possible.
CRISPr came along about a decade ago and opened new doors to modifying genomes.
The advance reported here could be less about any need for dire wolves, and more about development toward additional applications. If/when we can reliably use CRISPr in applications like this one, we might be able to create better pollinators, more drought tolerant or fire resistant plants, animals with new capabilities (pandas that reproduce more easily, apex predators able to get by on less acreage, whatever).
And, you know, woolly mammoths, which are sexier than fire-resistant palm trees and more likely to get investors to open their wallets. Crichton used this idea as well.
We've changed Earth* and are barreling toward 2 degrees then 3 degrees warming. We all need to stop with the plastics and petroleum. We need to ask less of Earth, which to me means lowering our reproductive rate. If we made those kind of choices, then Earth could support us and the biodiversity we evolved alongside.
But people don't want to hear this, and the idea of resurrecting extinct megafauna excites enough investors that engineering Earth (instead of living sustainably on it) seems to be the path we're choosing instead.
I think this is why they went with Dire Wolves. Money, and a general trajectory toward some intentional reshaping of our home.
*not to mention all the many thousands of satellites and space debris and now we want to reshape Mars and so on and so forth as well because that should work out real well /sarcasm
p.s. this is not a particularly well thought-out post but is a basic response of capitalistic pragmatism to the question "why dire wolves." The answer is the flip of "why don't we cure disease that only impacts one in a billion people." The answer is money.
