This is part of the reason that it can take so long to comprehend a genuinely innovative new technology: it doesn't win the game that's being played -- it plays a different game entirely.
When airplanes came along, rail companies could quickly (and correctly!) judge that they would never be hauling coal and cattle and such. Therefore: airplanes are just a toy; we can safely ignore them.
Similarly, when television came along, the radio industry said: "people listen to the radio when they are working, driving, or drifting off to sleep. You can't do anything else when you're staring at a screen, so television isn't a threat."
What these industries failed to realise is that while the the new technologies were non-competitive on the use-cases that railways and radios had optimised for, the new entrants could win on metrics that the old industry had never thought to care about.
(All this is fairly standard Christensen disruptive-technology stuff, BTW.)
Anyhow, the thing about the legacy aerospace industry is this: they weren't playing the "let's build and fly rockets" game. They were playing the "let's maximise our funding" game. The rules of this game are as follows:
1. Spend all the money you get, otherwise your budget will be cut next year.
2. Spend even more money than you get, and do as little as you can with it, so that you can plead the necessity of a funding increase next year.
3. The more money you get, the more of a political base you can establish. The more of a political base you've established, the harder it will be to cancel the whole program.
Underlying all of this is the axiomatic assumption that the spaceflight market is essentially inelastic. Weather and positioning and communications and spy satellites need to be launched at more or less any cost, but any reduction in launch prices won't be matched by a corresponding increase in demand. Therefore: if you cut costs, you're just leaving money on the table and putting your political base at risk. Don't do it.
Typical aerospace management was playing this game exceptionally well. NASA's heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, has spent $14B last time I looked, and is still years away from its first launch. Its launches will cost a billion dollars apiece. That's actually not easy to accomplish. If I gave you $14B and told you -- a person with only a passing interest in space stuff -- that I wanted a heavy-lift rocket in return, I'm quite you could do it. All you need to do is put out a tender for heavy-lift services, with payments made on a milestone/per-launch basis. Award these to several teams to keep things robust and competitive. Job done.
On the other hand, if I gave you $14B and told you to spend it on the appearance of serious rocket development work, I think you'd find it quite challenging. Spending that money without flying a damned thing takes exceptional skill. Hats off to any program manager who can accomplish this!
But when SpaceX comes along and decides that the rules they want to play by are "build and operate the most amount of rocket for the least amount of money", the rest of the industry simply couldn't figure out WTF game SpaceX was playing at. Most of the industry still hasn't figured it out.
Yes! Another way to say this: would-be innovators often fail or are delayed because the game they perceive is not the game being played. In aerospace, as you point out, we ought to change the game.
In other situations, say nutrition, we shouldn't (or at least I won't). E.g. Soylent sees the "game" as "get nutrition with minimal muss/fuss", whereas I prefer to see it as "enjoy experimenting with food prep and then consume with friends".
Missing the "game" perspective, the article too much boils down to "people are stupid", and that's not a winning perspective if you're trying to drive technology adoption.
NASA's contractors are in the corporate pork market. They're strongly incentivised not to get shit done.
But this is no different to the equivalent in the private sector - especially B2B software, where the game is about locking corporate customers into insanely exploitative contracts while providing a service that mostly sort-of works, more or less.
This a solvable problem in at least certain circumstances. Kennedy fixed it problem in the 60s by giving NASA (+contractors) a deadline and by framing the project as a patriotic race. Under those conditions they did at least as well - possibly better - than SpaceX is doing today.
It would be harder to do the same today in aerospace because the political conditions are so different.
None of this has anything to do with some vague handwaving about "resistance to technology." Most people are just fine with new technology, as long as it doesn't blow up in their faces - literally or otherwise - and offers real and obvious benefits.
What they're not fine with is being sold crap that doesn't work and makes their lives harder. And IT has always been a mix of good stuff with a lot of crapware tagging along for the ride.