Comments like yours make me react because I feel sorry to see people fall for this kind of manipulations.
Don't be deterred from applying advices that have helped thousands of companies because of an unsubstantiated rant by some guy on HN. His comments (assuming poster is male, apologies if I'm mistaken) are light in arguments and sound more like personal attacks directed specifically at Eric Ries, they don't really address the value of the Lean Startup methodology. The language is strong and bullish in an attempt to sound smart and to rally people to some point. What that point is is left to the reader to figure out.
X is not as successful as Y, therefore X cannot give advice to Y. What kind of logic is that? Counter examples abound, Nick Bollettieri never played tennis professionally but is one of the most acclaimed coaches in the sport. Closer to home, Patrick McKenzie had built a bingo card creator (profitable, while admittedly not an earth shattering success if you go by unicorn standards) when he started giving valuable advices to people and companies "orders of magnitude" more successful.
Also, pinning IMVU, a well established company, against other "orders of magnitude" more popular, more affluent, and also well established companies is not only a fallacious metric for success, but it's not even relevant to discredit the book or the methodology, since we're not even talking about startups anymore. IMVU is 14 years old, it has long outgrown the advices in the book. Most founders know that one of the first biggest challenges for a startup is to survive and grow (fast) the first year, then the next 3, then the following 5. Over the course of those objectives you'll make mistakes. Methodologies such as "Lean Startup" are meant to provide you with some tools and guidelines to navigate those shallow waters and to prevent you from knocking yourself out of the game permanently. If you're looking for real metrics to evaluate its worth as a guideline, survival rate or financial loss of startups would be more apt indicators. What's the survival rate of startups following patterns laid out by the Lean Startup (or some derivative adaptation, since there are many now) vs survival rate of startups doing things pre-Lean-Startup style?
"Orders of magnitude" are not indicative of success, objectives are. If your goal is to generate $10k of monthly passive income because you want more lifestyle autonomy, I think reaching those numbers qualifies.
As for your question, I think my main criticism regarding the Lean Startup is that much time is spent telling you to "talk to customers", but very little on teaching you how to actually do it. Therefore, I believe that investing some time to learn a proper approach to leads generation, cold outreach, and sales as it's done in the context of a startup would unlock a major achievement in your pursuit of growth (and success).