It does a decent job of conveying the essential idea for a broader readership: perturb a graph through its adjacency matrix just enough to make the universality conjecture hold for the distribution of eigenvalues -> analytically establish that the perturbation was so small that the result would carry back to the original adjacency matrix (I imagine this is an analytical estimate bounding the distance between distributions in terms of the perturbation) -> use the determined distribution to study the probability of the second eigenvalue being concentrated around the Alon-Bopanna number.

I haven't had a chance to read the paper and don't work in graph theory but close enough to have enjoyed the article.