The article paints them like a married couple doing a mind meld. That's impossible to duplicate by making programmers work as a pair. I'd expect the opposite to happen much more often; two programmers forced to share the same monitor and keyboard would start to dislike each other intensely.
Early Google's success came from substantial pair programming by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.
Some say Google wouldn't have been successful without this pair working together how they did.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...