The rhetorical sleight of hand is that it's not true that feeling you're being censored - and needing to self-censor - is the same as actually being censored.
Self-censorship and self-selection are endemic in the corporate world, and the associated beliefs are mostly taken for granted without dissent.
You're not going to get far in fintech, management consulting, or media channels such as Fox if you start questioning why so many people are poor, ill, and homeless.
Similarly, if you work for FAANG you're not going to have a job for long if you start suggesting these BigCos should reinvent themselves as worker co-ops.
That's a very different kind of argument to the one about pronouns, because most people are not actually threatened in real terms by (say) LGBTQIA+ or unionisation.
Of course plenty of people are just fine with how things are and the article is right to the extent that it points out that ideological conformity is a middle class luxury.
Which makes it really important to determine the actual boundaries of that domain of expertise.
A decent corollary to that: how the pro-Israel media campaign is working out in the latest flare up with Palestine now that TikTok has been added into the mix, a fantastic illustration of the real reason they want to take it down.
I think we should be charitable with the author and not assume a "dumb idea" is something he disagrees with, but rather is something that was proven to be bad by the passage of time.