Quoting from that article (which I remember reading when it came out): "It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time."

Mozilla and Firefox are better products. Many other solutions use their code (e.g. TOR).

All bets are off when competing against a monopolist.

Netscape maybe died because the technical debt forced them to bet the company on making a better product...which they did.

No doubt the Mozilla-based Netscape was ultimately a better browser, but's hard to think there wasn't a path to a better browser though incremental updates that wouldn't have taken 3 years of stagnation.