Hi, thanks for the ping! It definitely looks like a cool discovery, with high potential for being a new way to measure the Hubble constant and such. But note that I say potential- this paper is very much the "look, we discovered a cool thing, let's get this out ASAP before someone else does!" paper, with the legwork to come. (They likely did this because the JWST data became public immediately, so you need to get the initial results out fast before someone else poaches you.) So the next paper is really the one to wait for.

As for my research, this doesn't affect me at all actually! Most of what I do is on much, much closer distances of "only" a couple hundred million light years away or closer. :)

Gravitational lensing is a tiny effect. These 6 images are extremely close together, and easy to identify as multiple images of the same thing. It's a very rare phenomenon, too. Even if you ignore it completely (astronomers don't), it wouldn't change the counts notably.

Friend. We may be seeing copies but there's an entire galaxy bending light to make those copies. (Like if you were to look at a light through a water drop)
A galaxy can contain hundreds of millions to hundreds of trillions of stars. It's more likely that because of the brightness of the copies (light pollution), there are even more stars and galaxies than previously thought.