Hollow Knight is likely around 10-12 million copies sold by now (one typical rule of thumb: Steam reviews * 30-40 = Steam sales, 201k reviews, and the game also did gangbusters on consoles). This is half my point. The perceived decline in relevance discussed in the article is not real. It may be real if you measure sales as a percentage of the highest selling game in the extant universe, but that's a foolish measure.

I don't really understand most of the other stuff; yes, some games have slightly more punishing implementations of mechanics than others (Dead Rising uses the real-time forward-only approach). I named some high profile examples which are in the approximate orbit of what was discussed. It can't possibly be the article's thesis that minor variation between two games implementing a quasi real-time progression gate constitutes a major arc in the history of narrative gaming.