Agreed, Ian Goodfellow wasn't the first to come up with the idea of jointly training a generator and discriminator. But he was the first to make it work for image generation with modern neural networks. For that Ian Goodfellow deserved to get most of the credit, and he did.

Frankly, I do, and it comes across as quibbling about categories and trying to define unnecessarily general taxonomic categories, as a reaction to positive reactions to other people.

ex. in the article: "Goodfellow eventually admitted that my PM is adversarial...but emphasized that it's not generative. However, [it] is both adversarial and generative (its generator contains probabilistic units)...It is actually a generalized version of GANs."

When you're at "actually, probabilities means generative, and actually you know what, even my initial claim was too specific: turns out its a generalized version of GANs", all in service of arguing a paper should have been cited in another paper, years after the other paper has been published, there's not much room for sympathy.

This sounds a bit like a justification of plagiarism. In science, you must cite the original work.