There's a few points on here I'd like to debate:
- I haven't played an RTS recently, but the last time I dived into the genre there was lots of innovation: World in Conflict had an entirely new resource-based deployment system, Warhammer 40k Dawn of War and Company of Heroes both employed brand-new "capture and hold" territory-based gameplay. You could argue that League of Legends and DOTA both contribute to this genre as well.
- The author mentions several times that they didn't have the time or resources to spend on map creation. Level design is a pretty important aspect of any game development - maybe the Hard Vacuum game would've taken off if they had content?
- "A team like this today can not even hope to create a major blockbuster game". See: decent indie studios all over the world. Maybe it's just that the definition of "major game" has changed since the 90's.
While I agree with the main premise of the article, that game designers need to take a critical, uninfluenced look at the genres they design games for, it feels like the author hasn't attempted to play a game in the last 10 years.