It's not written about extensively by academics because...although a very impressive piece of artistry...it's not exactly a landmark piece and analysis about it's purpose is mostly speculative.

Facts about it are pretty straight forward. It was found in the 1st dynasty tomb of Sabu (~3100 BCE). It's made out of a shale-like stone. Because of that it's frequently referred to as the "Schist Disk" or "Schist Plate."

It's probably a ceremonial dish or incense burner or something like that. As you can see the lobed design pops up in Egyptian pottery.

If you're looking for an academic source on it, Cyril Aldred wrote a blurb about it. He speculates that it might have been a stone imitation of a metal original. As I said though, it's purely speculation and as far as I know he has no evidence to support that.

So...I'm in a bit of a catch-22 situation. The problem I'm facing is I can find absolutely no reliable sources on the study of this object (and I don't have access to Emery's work that they discuss). The best thing I can find is on Brian Walter Emery's wikipedia page and it's an unsourced statement that the cairo museum has labelled it as a "schist vase"...hardly a good source.

I've also been searching to at least try and corroborate some of the statements they made that should be fairly simple to find...or would be extremely simple had they included any references (e.g. when they claim Cyril Aldred stated it was a copy of an older metallic object). Unsurprisingly, it seems like these sites just make the same claim without any source.

Now, one thing I can absolutely refute is that this disk was a wheel as many of the websites talking about this imply. It's made of schist which is nowhere near durable enough to be used as a wheel (it's essentially an amalgam of a few different minerals. This means schist will flake or break easily. To quote the Cambridge Guide to Minerals, Rocks and Fossils:

schist is a coarse-grained rock with a marked layering, defined by platy or elongate minerals, often finely interleaved with quartz and feldspar

If you've ever done construction, think of it like oriented strand board. It's not exactly a weak material, but carving that would be a pain and you could flake bits of wood off of it if you tried.

I'm sorry I'm not able to provide more help. Hopefully someone can come along who owns Archaic Egypt or is familiar with Cyril Aldred's statement on the schist vase. Unfortunately, with something this old, the end answer may just be "we don't really know what it was used for or how they made it".

edit: Looks like /u/TheWizard01 found the Cyril Aldred blurb that the article you linked to was likely referencing. Unsurprisingly, while he did speculate it copied a metal object, he said nothing about this metal object being "without a doubt, a copy of a previous, much older metallic object" (emphasis mine).