I'm clueless on the subject and don't intend to argue the point, but it struck me that the metric that article consistently uses is one that almost guarantees the results: It's not surprising to learn that the categories that have the greatest amount of activity by far are the ones with the most CEQA challenges.

The point would be much stronger if it was made in terms the rate of challenges for varrious project types rather then in terms of frequency of CEQA challenges being that kind of project.

The assumption I'd draw from that, being ignorant of the subject, is that the argument is unsupportable on that more reasonable basis.