I think the author is right that the main pleasure of Tolkien is to revel in the vast world he created, both strange and yet archetypally familar. Where I disagree is that this is necessarily a bad thing.

I think we lack the vocabulary to describe this art form of building convincing universes. We can only conceive of it as a subordinate to narrative, with words like 'mise-en-scene'. But that doesn't quite cover what Star Wars or Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons or Grand Theft Auto really are. World-building is arguably the dominant art form of the late 20th century and early 21st.