Exactly.
A naturally unfair advantage at the type of research that involves experimentation and/or discovery is a characteristic that most PhD's do not actually have. Plenty still do, but most do not.
But without a PhD you will need to work your way up to outperforming those with credentials by a factor of 10x to 20x.
Forget working in academia, but you will be expected to hang with them and make progress that they can obviously recognize, without intimidation difficulties either way.
It's doable, and can be quite rewarding in itself.
If nothing else you could end up like it says in the article. You could have a thousand wonderful ideas just like everyone else, but you've got breakthroughs that could grow phenomenally where 99 percent of them would require capital. This doesn't make capital any more accessible to you than the average person on the street. If your breakthroughs are really good you should be able to make opportunity from the 1 percent that can be pursued without other people's money anyway, while using the resources already at hand.
Like it says, you could be the best innovator in the world but without undue good fortune it is extemely unlikely that ANY of your efforts will ever be leveraged towards the masses regardless of how beneficial or not.
In the hypothetical 99 to 1 scenario, IF you can implement the full 1 percent of your technical ability, then your odds are excellent by comparison since only 99 percent of your life's work will be lost.
PhD's don't have as much opportunity as there was in the past either, everybody's got to work around it.
And it's probably even more important to be careful against bad fortune, which is a LOT worse than a simple lack of good fortune.