I think the author has a point, but not the point they were trying to make.
The love for the word meritocracy in tech came from a culture of optimism. Optimism affected each layer of the system differently. Executives loved these kinds of office spaces because it was an easy sell to investors, partners, future employees, and clients. Their value was expressed in opulence. For engineers that optimism was expressed in attitudes and greenfield development - the slogans of yesteryear are artifacts of that "In meritocracy we trust", and "Don't be evil".
Of course, a decade after greenfield development had stuck around it became just the field. There's been a shift in tech recently which I think comes from recognizing that as much as you may desire it to move more quickly, the world moves at its own pace. You can seemingly make the ball move more quickly in the short term but in the lattice of time the ball has still moved marginally. People grew up and realized that the optimism we had worked for a few, but not always the ways we intended, and at times worked backwards.
That's not to say we're in a cynical rut, just that things aren't as glossy. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area became unaffordable to live in even for engineers. No longer could you have a house, you had to be happy with an apartment or a condo priced a few orders of magnitude above what national averages were. Commutes became long and those that had moved to SF in the early days or already owned homes voted not to improve expanding train lines so that more workers could come to work while enjoying the same fruits those early workers had. The dream soured.
I was in SF as this all changed. I met a wonderful woman, I switched to a remote job, and I moved to a place with less tech workers. I still love writing code, if you visit my house the space dedicated to creativity is quite a set. I have other hobbies though; I have multiple gardens and a greenhouse, a place for chickens, and a space for my dog to run like an idiot.
I never got the millions that people would murmur and dream about. I got what $475k in SouthEast Portland, Oregon would afford me and I was more than happy with that. It's why I'm so adamant that working from home is the right thing to do. I don't need a short order cook, my deli guy will do. I don't need a huge space dedicated to open air conversations, Slack huddles out of my parlor or on my patio will do. I don't need a sardine can office to maximize developers/sqft my quiet office will do.
The optimism, in my eyes, shifted from one centered around the company and the progress we could make as an industry to, "Where can I go to do what I do and make progress with a community that is not work?" That's to say, tech is rediscovering that it is part of the open world, not the leader of it.
Good article; it's thought provoking and I'd read it again. It's a good reminder of where we were a seemingly short time ago.