This is old web journalism. All the links in the text are actual links to other articles or pieces of information. This is how most news articles were in the 90s and early 2k. Y’know, before all the links in the text turned into ad links. This article gives a jumping off point to find out more info. The opinion piece does nothing but attract attention to the information linked within.
We’re all here talking about it so it seems to have worked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Don’t give them that much credit. They just started providing a service (finally) that the private servers were providing. People were asking for vanilla servers from them even when BC was live.