An optional challenge gives an implementation of arrays for jlox at least: https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/blob/4a84...
An observer falling into the black hole would not observe any distortion in time. They would simply fall in, under the influence of gravity. From the perspective of a far-away observer it would look as if time is slowing down as the photons would take increasingly longer to escape. At the event horizon the photons would effectively be held in place. Eventually though, the last photon will have escaped and you will just observe a slightly larger black hole.
So the merger definitely happens from the point of view of the black holes. We might observe odd artifacts but they would eventually fade away.
Are you suggesting Rust should automatically insert the borrow annotation because it is able to see that a borrow is sufficient? That would be quite unintuitive and make it ambiguous whether a for loop is borrowing or consuming the iterator without reviewing the body. I'd strongly argue that it should unambiguously do either one or the other and not try and read the author's mind.
I think you have misread the abstract. The 'low statistical significance' was a [prior work](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acf577). This paper has increased the significance to 3-sigmas which is on the lower end but still quite significant.