I have actually reviewed this man's supposedly vigilante's submission to the USPTO and it is clear that this story is not what it seems. The document is a highly professional 95+ page document of complex legal argumentation that only a law firm with a small team of lawyers with a lot of prior experience doing this could have put together. It contains lots of lawyer speak and contemporary argumentation that a lay person would simple not have knowledge of. As much as people are keen to believe the vigilante narrative, there is zero chance that is what happened here. Instead, he was used as a 'strawman' by a company with much deeper pockets to attack Waymo's key patent. I estimate that this actually cost around $100k to prepare and file.
This link shows the claims of the published application. The recently allowed claims are a lot more narrow and less problematic. Still worth reviewing though in case you are worried you infringe:
Exactly. Furthermore, the claims are not limited to 'capacitive touch' screens and could in fact apply to gestures on any touch screen system, so a large part of the article is pointless and wrong.