There does seem to be an ever-increasing number of PR releases and media stories hyping amazing new discoveries when the papers they're based on are about hypotheses for further investigation or simply speculative...Let me make a general comment about these articles you refer to.
They are examples of popsci articles written for the general public.
Popsci articles can vary from faithfully reproducing the science to exaggeration and sensationalism.
Your links sit somewhere between the extremes.
The first one is fairly restrained although the title “There’s Growing Evidence That the Universe Is Connected by Giant Structures” is somewhat premature as the article goes onto to state this needs to be independently confirmed and more data is required.
The second link is less credible as it portrays speculation as fact.
Anne seeing you stuck at the event horizon is a prediction of the Schwarzschild metric which describes the distortion of spacetime time around massive bodies such as planets, stars and non rotating black holes and is an extreme example of gravitational time dilation, the lesser effects of which have been observed on Earth from the Rebka-Pound experiment to GPS satellite time corrections.
While this part of the article is “reasonably accurate” the rest is not.
Burning up on the event horizon due to Hawking radiation sounds convincing but has never been observed yet the article presents it as a fact.
The rest of the article dealing with the information and firewall paradoxes and entanglement is also based on the assumption that Hawking radiation exists.
In fact there are papers that question whether Hawking radiation exists in the first place.
This is what science is all about.
A cynical definition of a current scientific theory is that it is less wrong than the theory that preceded it.
There are four separate theories for gravity, the strong nuclear force, weak force and electromagnetism.
The problem here is to explain the formation and abundance of elements in the Universe at least three of the forces (strong, weak and electromagnetism) need to be unified in the early universe as explained by a GUT (Grand Unified Theory).
The scientists are getting there; the weak and electromagnetic forces have been unified to form an electroweak force in particle accelerators by the detection of W and Z bosons as predicted by theory.
The problem with testing a GUT is that the energy levels are way beyond what is possible with current particle accelerators.
Unifying gravity is a far greater problem; not only because it requires far larger energy levels than for a GUT but forming the theory itself is problematical using quantum field theory.
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