[Author here]
This is precisely why I tend to festoon my articles with links, as citations.
In the specialist world of desktop Linux, a lot of the stuff about rival toolkits and display servers is well-known and understood.
For the vast majority of people who work with computers, using Windows or macOS on the desktop and Linux only on servers if that, then this stuff is largely unknown. I try to bridge the gap by providing some context and explanation of what's going on, what it means, what it might lead to and so on.
Actually, from my own personal career history, even people working with Linux on the desktop often don't know much of this stuff. If they know enough to have a preferred distro and desktop, many people look no further.
Like once I was reading that a product I was an engineer on got a huge contract that I absolutely would have known about and would have been on call for. Remember that a lot of reg stories are banking on the idea that anyone who actually knows better won't break their NDA to inform the public.