I am the author of the article and it may seem wrong to you but it is the way things unfolded. Once interconnections were faster than the transistors, at the beginning of the 2000's that fact was reverted, now transistors are much faster than interconnection. It is the reason behind many other development, like multi-core devices. Since transistors are faster than interconnections, it is reasonable to make many units working fast than a big unit working slower because of the interconnections.

The tristate buffers were abandoned on the FPGA market, followed by the ASIC market.