I'm assuming you didn't read the article? He was comparing react + redux + react-router using create-react-app compared to Angular. So it is an apples to apples comparison.
Even if you add redux and react-router you still don't have feature parity. The comparison is inherently arbitrary. All I really know from his experiment is if I load up a feature rich framework vs. a bare-bones view+route+state combo the framework is going to be heavier. Is that really news?