Extremely strange to see this writeup with no mention at all of Droneseed, which has been doing this successfully for a few years now, engineered seed pods and all. I've written them up twice, if you're curious or skeptical about the one in TFA:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/26/that-night-a-forest-flew-d...

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/29/droneseeds-36m-a-round-mak...