I suspect it's just inaccurate journalism... in the big picture, Movable Type had a much larger impact than TypePad. And Six Apart wasn't exactly a tiny company; at peak it had over 200 employees between offices on three continents. Not huge by today's standards, but not small for a post-dotcom-burst startup.

I worked for Six Apart in NYC a few years after the LJ sale. By that point, Six Apart HQ (in SF) was nearly entirely focused on hosted platforms, and basically left Movable Type to the satellite offices. I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but I could certainly imagine some of the former LJ folks interviewed here may have commented about all the resources being moved to TypePad. So perhaps TypePad kept naturally coming up in these convos, and who knows if the article author had any prior familiarity with Six Apart or MT.

MT was such an amazingly powerful static site generator. Honestly I'd still use it today if it wasn't Perl-based and license-encumbered.