It seems like the author is taking a specific subset of ed-tech ("online learning companies that rely on the student's intrinsic motivation") and trying to generalize it to all ed-tech.

There are TONS of different companies doing some really interested stuff in ed-tech. Not only are there lots of ed-tech companies that aren't online learning companies, there are a lot of online learning companies that DON'T rely on a student's intrinsic motivation: e.g. anything in the K12 space - there are a lot of K12 schools that are beginning to incorporate online learning into their curriculum, and then there's plenty of extrinsic (e.g. grade-based) motivation to do well and perform.

I think my #1 takeaway from this is that the author isn't the target market for most of these ed-tech companies. They're not trying to get people to take these classes for fun, no more than colleges want people to take classes for fun.