It's wild that the author points to all the Google people writing W3C specs as if that's a positive sign. I'm not quite pessimistic enough to say all those people are 100% corporate shills, but there's no reason to expect that the stuff that gets into the W3C via Google is somehow magically detached from Google's profit motives. Google's effect on web standards is largely just another form of icky "embrace and extend" shenanigans.
The alternative is employees of OS vendors writing the specs. And they would intentionally drag their feet or even outright refuse to standardize features that encroached on native apps in order to maintain their walled gardens.
Apple did good things for the web with WebKit before iOS because it was in their interest to break the Windows desktop monopoly (and I'd argue that macOS has been a huge benefactor of Chrome taking down IE). They've been less than stellar post iOS now that they have a rent seeking business predicated on native apps locked away behind their app store.
