Yeah, I think the author strays a bit away from the title.
The author says, "The collaboration industry has spent a fortune obscuring a dirty truth: most complex, high-quality work is done by individuals or very small groups operating with clear authority and sharp accountability" which means collaboration can work... in the right environment and with the right people. I work in R&D and I could not imagine not working in a collaborative environment. It's not reasonable to have expertise at everything and it's understood that things have to get done no matter whose name is on the ticket/story.
I also agree on you calling out Men against Fire example as well. That's not a collaboration issue, that's a training issue (amongst other things). And that problem went away as you said.
> By 1946, the US Army had accepted Marshall’s conclusions, and the Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently pioneered a revolution in combat training which eventually replaced firing at ‘bulls eye’ targets with deeply ingrained ‘conditioning’ using realistic, man-shaped ‘pop-up’ targets that fall when hit. Psychologists know that this kind of powerful ‘operant conditioning’ is the only technique which will reliably influence the primitive, mid-brain processing of a frightened human being. Fire drills condition terrified school children to respond properly during a fire. Conditioning in flight simulators enables frightened pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations. And similar application and perfection of basic conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire to approximately 55 percent in Korea and around 95 percent in Vietnam.