No. That 1996 article is wrong on that point, and fluffy on others. It's straightforward to calculate finger travels for typing words on various keyboard layouts [1], and Dvorak easily comes out on top. Placing e on the home row alone is probably a significant improvement. Compare the home rows:

asdf jkl; aoeu htns

Placement of high-frequency letters, especially vowels, reduces finger movement and eases typing. There's no magic about it.

[1] www.typocheck.co.uk/dvorak/

Does that calculate the way between keys or guess a common hand/finger size to calculate actual hand movements?

How do finger travels affect efficiency? This is not obvious.

That article is mainly about the strawman argument that if Dvorak is better, then free markets are bad, because they lead to the kind of network effects that gave us QWERTY. (As a happy Dvorak user, I find this argument silly.) The author is very motivated to prove the premises false, for political reasons. I don't think it's very insightful.

OT: I haven't read this specific article, but have been on DVORAk for about a year and am happy about it. But one of the problems i have noticed in arguments for and against these kb layouts is the hand size. they vary from individual, and i can easily see someone with a bigger hand not realizing the same efficiency improvement as i did when i switched over.

*-- I switched over by trying Dvorak for an hour a day instead of the QWERTY i had used for about 3-4 weeks. I was a below average QWERTY user. Touch typist, but not fast/ not a lot of typing experience.