It's also a lot easier to work hard when you are handed access to every academic resource on the planet before you hit puberty. His life story is the most blatant counterexample to this article imaginable. Sounds like a case of deep denial.
You can personally thank my grandparents, all four laying dead in their graves before the age of 60, for your opportunity to "work hard" in America.
"After many nerve-wracking minutes of closed-door de- liberation, the examiners did decide to (barely) pass me; however, my advisor gently explained his disappointment at my performance, and how I needed to do better in the future. I was still largely in a state of shock—this was the first time I had performed poorly on an exam that I was genuinely interested in performing well in."
"In retrospect, nearly failing the generals was probably the best thing that could have happened to me at the time."
[1] https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202007/rnoti-p1007.pdf
He sounds like he's lived his entire life in a university basement and mistook the petty challenges of academia for real life.
However, I don't think you're trying to criticize the article as bad evidence in relation to achieving a math PhD. You're going on about academia having low stakes and academia not representing real life. If I'm mis-characterizing this, then I apologize. I do believe you're moving the goal posts in this discussion. The original article posted is about math graduate school. That's all. It's not about real life. The first two sentences in the article establish this point.
> Relying on intelligence alone to pull things off at the last minute may work for a while, but, generally speaking, at the graduate level or higher it doesn’t.
> One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics;