From "Law and Order" to "CSI," not to mention real life, investigators have used fingerprints as the gold standard for linking criminals to a crime. But if a perpetrator leaves prints from different fingers in two different crime scenes, these scenes are very difficult to link, and the trace can go cold.
Have you read the link? It doesn’t say thay that analysing figerprints is less powerfull than was known, but more. It describes previously unknown connection between fingerprints of different fingers of a single person. This could indicate, for example, that two crimes were probably commited by the same person even when not a single identical fingerprint was found on both sites.