that statement seems heavily draw on the idea that success is the result of a meritocracy. But 'how good something is' often plays a small part in the selection of winners and losers.
But we don't. So, no, that doesn't prove they're bad ideas. It does show that whatever benefit they have is underneath the noise floor of the experiment, though.
Registry and Powershell are integral parts of being a Windows administrator.
I might be leading a little, but just because nix didn't choose to use these things doesn't imply they are bad. Just nix is "different".
And I'm not arguing these things are "bad", exactly. I'm saying they aren't the panacea claimed in the article, that frankly they provide limited real benefit in a practical sense, and that the proof of this is that the one system that tried to implement them generically is aging glacially into legacy status without these ideas having propagated.
Basically: if these things were that great, at some point other systems would have picked them up while they moved on past windows. But they didn't. So... I guess my point is "why should we care about this stuff specifically?".
[1] Obviously the registry was emulated in the Linux world with the gconf/dconf stuff, which likewise was quite controversial and hasn't had anything close to universal adoption.