Anyways, I wish more people in the media would differentiate between the Merkel tree, providing the immutable ledger part, and the proof-of-work distributed consensus algorithm, which provides some degree of trust through burning an ever-increasing amount of power. Most of the benefits the author lists would be true of just the Merkel tree without needing the wasteful proof-of-work consensus system, if it's used between trusted parties. Also, even if there's not complete trust, it would still provide an audit trail so that appropriate actions could be taken against bad actors.
When the author later talks about governance boards, that just underscores the incongruity even more. While I'm sure governance boards could be shoehorned into some DAO-like system over distributed consensus, it seems a lot easier to just get rid of the whole distributed consensus altogether and give some digital signatures to the governance board that can sign/bless the Merkel tree.