It's banal but sensible in response to someone claiming a large difference between two fundamentally similar things. Either both or neither "invents".

As a non-expert in the field my impression from reading the article wasn't that they were saying there was a large difference, or it's a whole new approach, only that is was a progression over DL.

The entire article repeatedly relates everything in the context of what DL accomplishes and only introduces EC as an better optimized version.

Which doesn't lead one to think they are significantly different approaches but variations or tweaked versions of the same general thing...

The article makes this claim: "it addresses a distinctly different need: Whereas DL focuses on modeling what we already know, EC focuses on creating new knowledge."

This is just wrong.