The English folk-rock band Incredible String Band has a great song where they sing "Happy man, the happy man, doing the best he can the best he can".
Inability for the human body to cope with something is not the result of evolution but the lack of evolution. Evolution is still going on.
And I would even take it as a mistake being done here to claim a stake. Being that, they can only ever source the answer from the same place Senator Armstrong does everything in his life. How CAN you solve the problem of finding your best life, how CAN you say you were more mindful and therefore, got rewarded? How CAN anyone say be more like this?
You can't poll for it, people are very often bad a either introspection or at retrospectives, and more than anything - they don't actually know. They will biasedly speak positively of bad experiences and rash decisions that benefited them and vice-versa. Few will have the maturity to turn and say they were glad to have met toxic person or workplace or that it helped them overall despite taking away 30 years of their life. And that's still their prerogative opinion. Opinions are nice and all, but not the answer we seek. We seek the actual, real impact, that mindfulness has on life paths. The state of mind in the moment. It is unknowable. And often, whoever discredits the notion, is suspiciously also handing out brochures.
I don't see eye to eye with the article. Feels like a sermon by someone who doesn't actually peer much beyond any veil. They're just judging people, on the hardest game there is. I play competitive team based games, but I never play ranked. It's full of awful people with lots to say of others.
Past events can't be changed, and we are not the person who made the decision at the time anymore.
Making a decision while angry? If one has not the capacity to see through anger when making a decision - a lack of mindfulness perhaps, then that decision even when made in anger is the best they could do at that point. If one practices mindfulness and can often deal with anger but fails this time, that is still the best that person could do given who they are when a decision is being made. There is nobody to blame.
Even perceived self-sabotage is still acting within some particular framing. If that person Knew something different about the nature of their being at a perspective and participatory level, they likely would have made different more constructive choices.
Everything emerges exactly as it should due to what is Known and is at any particular time. The nature of self being a lifelong quest to understand, the more we understand about it the better the decision we can make. Probably explains the importance of 'Know thyself' to Socrates. But there is never a wrong choice as you say, only non-optimal. Only that which was made due to you having not been some particular other potential version of you.
Learning makes change possible. Not all learning is good for you. You never know you're learning as you're doing it - for if you're self aware you aren't paying attention as so can't learn, but if you are paying attention you're not aware about "learning". Thus we should pay attention to what is good and trust that we are learning. And trust that we are also learning when we pay attention to what is bad for us.
We all wish we could go back and fix a mistake or two; but we often don't realize that doing so might unravel many other positive events. Everyone has regrets, but we don't get to see what would have happened if we had made a different decision at every turn.