I did the science fair circuit growing up from 7th through 12th grade, then coached HS students on projects when I was in college. Today I'm a judge for ISEF, which is happening shortly.
Frankly, the whole scene is a bit done by 12th grade, so I'm not really sure this person has enough experience doing fairs to say what's broken about them and how to fix them. It's really a middle school to early high school thing; if you're starting in senior year most of the best students are already set with results they will use to apply to colleges, so they stop doing fairs in senior year. 8,9,10 is the real heat.
It's also not the common case that a student is placed in a research lab and works on in-progress research, you see all kinds of students doing varied projects. I judge the CS field and yeah you get projects which are essentially "Me and my dad built a PC" (although I've never seen a volcano project). Others are like "Here's a robot I built" and it's cool but not really novel. Some of them have a giant board with binders upon binders upon binders and it's clear the kid was coached and worked at his mom's lab. The "consumer science" category of the fair grows every year.
But really no matter what, I find this to be true of all students at the fair:
> Science exploration driven by genuine curiosity is more open-ended than experiments that come in a box and test students on whether they get the right answer.
All the kids exhibit genuine curiosity and open-mindedness. Some of them are only capable of doing experiments that come in a box, but they're still curious. So I don't really know what the author is trying to say with this article. Is there actually a problem, and if so how bad is it? I'm all for changing up the science fair and evolving it and doing a new format, but I don't think they're especially lacking in innovative spirit as the author implies.