The sampling problem is still real. There's a difference in say the cutup of the amen break into 40 parts and painstakingly re-orchestrating it and taking the strings from Led Zeppelin's Kashmir, playing it in a loop for 4:55 and rapping over it (see
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_Some_Kill). To be hyper specific, that's why say, Tyree's Acid Overture, which samples the same song and was released the same year and recorded in the same city, didn't see any push back (
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vJeFIBhZTBE) - it's used more like a paintbrush in that one.
There's very much an arbitrary judgment call here. Bob James probably had a case with Run DMC Peter Piper (which is take me to the Mardi gras) but he's always been really chill about it. They lucked out.
Same thing here. There's this amorphous "creative effort" that creates an abstract distance between the works. Unless the engineers can show an effort to respect and police this distance, I think things might get dicey