It will certainly do that if the buffer is full.
prevents the implicit blocking
No, that's exactly the case of implicit blocking mentioned above.
Does anyone else find this article rather AI-ish? The extreme verbosity and repetitiveness, the use of dashes, and "The limitation isn't conceptual—it's syntactic" are notable artifacts.
After reading the whole thing, yes! Specifically it feels incoherent in the way AI text often is. It starts by praising unix pipes for their simple design and the explicit tradeoffs they make, and then proceeds explaining how we could and should make the complete opposite set of tradeoffs.
prog1 -input input_file -output tmp1_file
prog2 -input tmp1_file -output tmp2_file && del tmp1_file
prog3 -input tmp2_file -output tmp1_file && del tmp2_file
...
progN -input tmpX_file -output output_file && del tmpX_file
You can consider that an OS/resource specific limitation, rather than a limitation in the concept.