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I think what this is referring to is that Unix is not especially designed to give priority to desktop processes. BeOS was.

Indeed, that's completely untrue. What BeOS did was to make the front-end as multithreaded as possible and as high-priority as possible.

Which is reasonable for a desktop single-user OS, but completely unacceptable for a multi-user server OS.

I'm not sure what Linus' personal intentions were when he first started it, but perhaps the article is talking about the fact that Unix was originally developed for mainframes.

Unix was originally developed on what were called minicomputers[1]. These were a distinct class from mainframes, which have always run a whole separate class of proprietary OSes such as IBM's MVS.

Of course nowadays Linux runs pretty well on IBM's mainframes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer

And its first incarnation ran on a PDP-8. I think my analog watch has more computing power than that ;-)