People who level that critique at Apple are the equivalent of sports fans of rivals to the Yankees constantly talking trash about the Yankees. That is, it may make fans of Apple angry (and it did all throughout the 90s and 00s) but it had no impact on the fundamentals of Apple's business. While people were leveling that critique against Apple, Apple was selling millions of iMacs, then hundreds of millions of iPods, and now over a billion iPhones. Now I would say it's extremely shallow analysis of Apple as a business to say they were
just repackaging tech (you don't do hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue over the past 20 years if you aren't actually innovating [EDIT: actually iOS devices alone have done almost a trillion in revenue], especially if you don't have a monopoly in the relevant markets).
Tesla is not Apple though. In order for the analogy to Apple to work, Tesla would have to be shipping a massive amount of EVs (and a growing amount as well) while they were being criticized. They haven't. In fact the penetration of EVs as a % of all cars sold is single digits.
If you want to take the perspective of the author of the article, then we can at least say that Tesla may have induced rival car makers to at least get interested in EVs and demonstrated a small market exists for them, but it's not clear that once every automaker begins shipping EVs at scale that it's going to replace non-EVs in the market in a significant way. What if EVs just top out at 20%?
On another level it's kind of a silly perspective to take because real people have invested their money in Tesla. A lot of them might be rich tech workers who no one will shed tears for, but big institutional investors like Fidelity own significant stakes in Tesla, and they're managing 401ks for regular people.
I don't think too many investors who invested in telecom companies during the tech bubble took comfort in the fact that at least society was left with a lot of fiber and infrastructure.
What would Tesla even leave behind anyway? The only thing I can think of is the battery factory which hopefully would be able to produce batteries for other manufacturers. But even that is not clear to me since China is pouring billions into doing that as well (and they're going to have a lower cost of capital compared to some private entity without state backing).