The headline confused me as well: 33 solar masses (not sizes) seems tiny to me, I was sure we knew of bigger ones
The difference is even more clear-cut because so-called intermediate mass black holes are something of a question mark. For a long time it wasn’t clear whether they even exist in any significant numbers, and even now the evidence is not especially rock-solid, especially with regard to candidate objects in the Milky Way.
While it's possible that supermassive black holes were formed from stellar collapse, there are models where they didn't, while they _know_ that this one was formed from stellar collapse.