This sounds plausible. Heck, adding a flavor and color additive could probably do it, once you find the right mix.
What is a major part of bourbon aging is that the barrels are in towering warehouses that get really hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Every year the bourbon seeps into the charred wood and then back out of it due to the temperature change. Each year the flavor changes a little more due to that process.
If you can do it just by letting the moonshine (which is basically what it starts as) pick up the flavors from chopped up charred oak due to the massive surface area of the wood, that’s great. We’d have super cheap bourbon that still tastes good.
But since most of the price of a bottle of bourbon is taxes anyway, this is kinda pointless.
How much of bourbon is fermented wood?
Friend of a friend was a chemist, and he could take any whisky, analyze it and make his own version that was pretty dang close to the original - certainly close enough that nobody could really tell the difference...
It appears to be a matter of surface area. Chips of oak would have magnitudes of surface area compared to surface area of a barrel.