[Blog post author here]
I agree. Um, perhaps I should have used a less obscure word than "odious"? :-)
"arousing or deserving hatred or repugnance; hateful; an odious crime; a false and odious comparison."
This does neglect the reason, which was well-known at the time and may be forgotten by now. MS was subject to a monopoly lawsuit by the US Department of Justice back then, and was trying to show that IE was an inextricable part of the Windows OS.
If IE were just a web browser, you could remove it and the OS would still function just fine; but if it's also the desktop, you can't uninstall it without crippling the OS -- therefore, it's part of the OS and MS couldn't be told to remove it.
And that's the only real reason.
The slight side-note being that "Active Desktop" was multithreaded, like the MacOS 8 Finder.
In Win95 or MacOS 7, if you started a file copy (for example), the whole desktop froze until the copy was done. You couldn't do anything else except sit there and watch the progress bar.
In MacOS 8, the Finder (the program that drew the desktop) got multi-threading along with lots of other improvements (desktop drawers, an easily-customisable Apple menu, and more). Start a big file operation and you could go do something else while it sat there working away in the background.
IE4's Active Desktop brought this to Win95 OSR3, Win98, and NT 4 if you installed IE4. But it was the only improvement. The rest was, as you say, bloat.