Yes, it did come up during my defense, but it was deemed not to be a concern since I had one prior paper [1] (the original one in this thread of work, the paper I linked above was an improvement over it), and my advisor (co-author on both papers) vouched for the quality of the work.
Thank you for pointing out the typo - will fix it!
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence...