The editorial Batson is reacting to (by Yao Yang) makes the point that the largest economic development project that lifted the vast majority of people out of poverty over the past 20 years was orchestrated by China, and the RCTs/small scale interventions that Duflo et. al. won the Nobel for had no role or relevance there. He focuses more on the policies guided by the "classic" development economists like Solow which emphasize domestic savings and investment.
Batson's post delves into who in China actually was responsible for the economic policy changes that created that development.
Personally, I welcome the the addition of RCTs to the economic research toolkit. For too long, economics has wrapped itself up in a mathematically complex knot that bears no resemblance to the real world. Behavioral economics has started to crack that by applying common sense, though too often they have dramatically overextrapolated their hard-to-replicate results.
Hopefully economists can see RCT as a tool which can be used where appropriate, rather than an entirely new paradigm that much be applied to everything (as they did with highly mathematical economics).