It definitely deserved a lot of praise, but the testing situation wasn't really against a fully fledged stockfish running on similar hardware, but one that, among other things, had no opening library.

The issue is not whether alphazero was impressive, but that we should be careful about the specific claims of the press releases, as they are known to oversell. The whole thing would have been impressive enough if the games had been against the last release of stockfish with good hardware, just for the way it played.