This article is very poorly written. It leaves out a lot of key details that could sway ones take away. It mentions that he has done a lot of bug bounties and not gotten paid for some of them. Were they duplicate reports? Was he doing these on his own merit and not going through the bug bounty programs?
The staff at hackerone and bugcrowd will make sure you are squared away when you are submitting reports and dealing with payouts. If a company were to refuse to pay you even though you submitted an in scope report that qualified for payment, these sites would help you resolve those conflicts.
This article to me tries to paint a picture of: Here is a hard working bug bounty hunter who's efforts barely go noticed because so many mean companies don't want to pay him, he can only make a meager living.
I take it as someone who doesn't go through the proper programs and sites, so he's playing with fire on getting his findings reported. If you are just some random hacker who emails a company out of the blue with a random vulnerability finding, most will not take you seriously. Companies who want to be hacked, have bug bounty programs and disclosure pathways. If he's as good as the article paints him to be, he should be making a ton more money than it says he is. So either he is getting royally screwed out of payments by not going through bug bounty programs, or he isn't as good of a hunter as he may seem.