They cite one of the works of Gert Smolka (Smolka and Panangaden, 1985), who was the original creator of Oz. But I agree that Van Roy and Haridi did a lot of research on functional logic programming back in the 1990s that seems to be ignored here.
When I worked on program semantics, I had the impression that PLT communities in the US and EU tend to ignore each other. This also translates to education. CTM is an epic book, and very readable, but I don't think it's well known or used much on the other side of the pond.
Yes, I was unaware of Smolka's early work and it does look very nice. (Much of Smolka's work seems underappreciated.) The evaluation in the paper under discussion of this work seems weak given that Smolka's early effort has a very similar set of features to what they want.
I concur about the research silo-ing. However in this case we have Europeans ignoring Europeans, and on that CTM page you will find a grab from a review in the Journal of Functional Programming. Several authors of this paper have published in the JFP, leading me to conclude that the JFP is a write-only journal, like much of CS literature.
When I worked on program semantics, I had the impression that PLT communities in the US and EU tend to ignore each other. This also translates to education. CTM is an epic book, and very readable, but I don't think it's well known or used much on the other side of the pond.