I don't think this is right at all. I would be surprised if Alfred Winslow Jones or Warren Buffet (who were some of the earliest "hedge fund" managers) were significantly influenced by Bachelier's ideas. Buffet is famously neither especially quantitative in his investment style nor a believer in EMH.

Financial "technology" pretty seldom actually originates in academia. It's more common that academics formally describe or justify something that market practitioners are already doing. The piece briefly mentions Bachelier doing this. There's good evidence that option prices were (relatively) efficient several decades before Black-Scholes was discovered. And Jones arguably came up with the notion of "beta" before CAPM was a thing. The only real exception I can think of is factor investing.

This might seem kind of petty. But the notion that academia drives (or should drive) finance is not a benign myth. The LTCM crisis and the 2008 GFC were arguably caused by the uncritical application of ideas developed in the academy. I expect more.