If enough sites start supporting it, you could get many of the benefits of RSS with the few benefits of massive silos like Twitter and Facebook.
The article is either pitching abstractions like "compatibility" or solutions to non-problems like the risk that Facebook might vanish.
Though I'm not convinced aggregation is a big problem.
But when you start having global monopolies in various industries that don't care about automatically banning the "little guy" from which they make little money to begin with and when you have governments that are increasingly more interested in let's say "curating" the internet, then that anti-censorship benefit starts to become a lot more appealing to a lot more people.
It's why I'm glad Firefox is not only finally a decent competitor to Chrome but also starting to adopt all sort of anti-censorship protocols and technologies, too (and hopefully there are more to come).
The rank of benefits is, of course, highly subjective. I'm speaking for myself.
How did it do that? It threw away all the technical and usability benefits it had over Chrome, so I guess it's "a decent competitor" instead of "a clear winner" for some purposes, like it once was. Is that what you mean?