The premise of this article seems to be that, if only Cisco had not been so focused on stock buybacks, it (and by extension the US) would have been a 'leader in 5G'.

I... sort of doubt that? First of all, the Cisco strategy has pretty much always been to acquire the lead player(s) in any sector it's truly interested in. R&D for possibly emerging markets is seen as a distraction that's best done outside the company: just fund it, spin it out even, then buy it back later when it turns out to be a good idea.

Secondly, Cisco has been burnt badly in the past by telco-related technologies (DSL and cable), where its US customers (Comcast, AT&T et al) rewarded its significant investments by rapidly turning to cheap commoditized competitors instead. Same thing happened in the 3G era to Ericsson/Nokia (with world-wide customers), and until the much more recent "well, you can't really use any Chinese equipment in your telco network" trend, you can't really blame anyone for actively ignoring that market.

Finally, it's debatable how much money there actually is to be made in '5G' as a standalone technology: like land-line telephony, the stack is pretty much indistinguishable from 'regular' datacenter tech these days, and apart from some niche management software and ultra-specialized radio hardware, it's hard to see where Cisco could have made a real difference, given the total lack of promising US-based (or even EU-based) acquisition targets in that space.