Is the SHC014 chimeric coronavirus "eerily similar" to Covid-19 in anything but a journalistic sense?
The "similarity" of this specific chimera was addressed in a recent paper concerning the lack of evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is lab-grown:


  Another claim in Chinese social media points to a Nature Medicine paper published in 2015 [7], which reports the construction of a chimeric CoV with a bat CoV S gene (SHC014) in the backbone of a SARS CoV that has adapted to infect mice (MA15) and is capable of infecting human cells [8]. However, this claim lacks any scientific basis and must be discounted because of significant divergence in the genetic sequence of this construct with the new SARS-CoV-2 (>5,000 nucleotides).


Liu, S. L., Saif, L. J., Weiss, S. R., &amp; Su, L. (2020). No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2. Emerging Microbes &amp; Infections, 9(1), 505-507.

The "eerily similar" nature seems at most to be something well recognized by virologists, particularly in the wake of SARS: coronaviruses circulating in bats could become dangerous to humans if mutations occur in key parts of their genome or recombinations occur with other coronaviruses in bats or intermediate hosts. That's more or less what happened with the first SARS and more or less what happened with SARS-CoV-2, as best as can be told right now.

I'd also take a bit of umbrage at the language used in that article:


  this new coronavirus was found so potent it could infect and replicate in human airway cells naturally


seems like a bit of fear-mongering. Any virus that affects humans can "naturally replicate" in human cells: the author could have merely written that instead of calling it "so potent".