Back when adults routinely wore hats outdoors, STEM teachers and authors used an expression "First find a place to hang your hat." when studying new concepts. IOW begin with material that you understand.
While reading the cited paper and following this discussion thread, I found a "place to hang my hat" in reference number
21] Abbott E A 1884 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Curious why the authors referenced this classic Victorian mathematical satire, I followed the Abbott reference back through this paper's critique of the prior Green and Wald (GW) papers.
The common thread among this critique and GW papers describes how scientists measure and understand the topology of their universe, specifically in 'Sphereland' with 3+1 dimensions discussed in section 2 of
your PDF. This paper discusses difficulties in proving relevance of backreaction inhomogeneities in cosmological theory without offering a primer on backreaction as a concept.