Wait, they retconned primaris all the way back to the Heresy?
....kay.
Not that I've done any reading on primaris, but the simple fact every Chapter and/or Legion had its own methodology for actually making humans into Space Marines makes me kind of incredulous that, from a scientific perspective, anyone would be replicatable results between different chapters.
The introduction fluff for the primaris, from the very start, was that they were started after the Heresy by Cawl on Guilliman's orders.
Basically Guilliman saw the events of the Heresy and the failings of his and his brother's sons, and as the regent after the Emperor was interred on the Golden Throne took his father's research notes from his lab and decided he couldn't do anything with it. So he grabs a somewhat deviant member of the newly formed Adeptus Mechanicus (as opposed to the pre-Heresy Mechanicum) and gives him the notes and tells him to make things better. This would be Cawl.
Cawl gets a bunch of existing marines, geneseed from all the Legions and humans to use as lab rats, tinkers for a while and manages to implement some features the Emperor had conceived of but never bothered to use, because for the Emperor the marines were good enough and he had a schedule to keep. Guilliman is mortally wounded by Fulgrim before Cawl can show him his work, so he just freezes all his creations and does other stuff, occasionally tinkering with them a little. No one except Guilliman actually has the authority to know Cawl was doing this, or to give the order to actually deploy the Primaris and the various divergent technologies created for their use, so Cawl doesn't tell anyone or use them. Not like he cares about all the people dying in the meanwhile, he might not even have an organic brain anymore.
Belisarius Cawl is something of a Heretek, he's unorthodox, defiant of convention and dogma, and ambitious. Not unusual for a member of the Mechanicum, but publicly frowned upon by the Mechanicus. He took on the project with the goal of using it to get Guilliman to make him the Fabricator General, an ambition he has held onto for something like 9000 years. Normally this lifespan would be impossible even for tech priests, but Cawl has done some outright heretekal things to prolong his life, and even made true AI copies of himself so he can be in several places at once. Too powerful for the Mechanicus to kill for his transgressions, but still enough of a renegade that they refuse to give him the higher ranks he thinks he should have.
Cawl sits on the project until Guilliman is brought back, with a combination of advanced life support and Eldar soul magic. With Guilliman back Cawl can now give him the army that was finished 9000 years prior and mothballed for political reasons. Guilliman takes this army and starts running around trying to reinforce all the beleaguered parts of the Imperium, splitting off bits to make new chapters or reinforce existing ones. Cawl asks Guilliman to make him Fabricator General, Guilliman considers the idea insane because the Mechanicus would never accept it and thinks it's stupid of Cawl to even ask.
TL;DR the events around the primaris reveal established that a Magos named Cawl had been given carte blanche to create an army of slightly improved marines during the Scouring, immediately after the Heresy, by Roboute Guilliman. He succeeded in implementing features the Emperor had planned but decided weren't important at the time and began mass producing his new primaris marines. Since the guy who asked him to do this was basically dead, Cawl just froze them all until such a time as they would be politically useful for him. When Guilliman was revived he got in touch with Cawl to find out what happened to the project, and was more than a little pissed off it had been mothballed rather than used.
Important context is that the Emperor didn't even want the space marines in the first place, all he wanted was his primarchs, the custodes and normal humans/abhumans. When the primarchs got yoinked he made the space marines from the scraps left over from that project, and while the result was more stable than their thunder warrior predecessors they were also kind of janky and inferior, a trade off for being relatively easy to produce. The space marines were a mediocre project pushed out on a rushed schedule to replace the primarchs.
That there have been efforts to improve on them is nothing new, the new thing is that the primaris aren't riddled with flaws like most other attempts to improve on the marines have been. A common thread in the Cursed Founding was the Mechanicus trying to fix flaws in the gene seed used, and it wasn't the only time they tried.
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