i think the part that you're missing is that this is what it's like for him and people in similar regions where a huge amount of things aren't an option to begin with and many more things are far more expensive than in the US or Europe. a lot of the article is about how the best part about RISC-V is that the chips and tools are available to more of the world.
no, i'm talking about the core designs, not finished CPUs you could buy. using a leading-edge node is prohibitively expensive so nearly everything RISC-V i've seen has been using around 22nm to 12nm nodes. if you had an example of any of those cores in a finished product on a similar node they should be competitive, and in the meantime once people can get their hands on them you could test them against each other at low clock speeds to see how they compare.
the author just focused on his personal experiences regarding RISC-V and what he's been able to see himself as an embedded developer. there's already RISC-V SBCs that are on par with the Raspberry Pi 5 and in terms of IPC the best RISC-V cores are only lagging 5 years or less behind the best x86 and ARM cores.
the current highest performance RISC-V systems you can buy off a shelf are equivalent to a raspberry pi 5 so they're not terribly behind. in terms of IPC, currently available RISC-V cores are already basically on par with Zen 3 and Apple M1 from what i understand and Jim Keller believes that RISC-V will be the one that leads the way for raw performance.
I feel like that's largely mitigated by profiles. RVA23 is really looking like it'll be the modern base target used for high performance application processors and it makes mandatory pretty much everything you'd want for those use cases, and other comments by people familiar with designing RISC-V CPUs mention that the variable length encoding can be dealt with in a very simple manner that doesn't even add another pipeline stage so it doesn't seem like it's all that big of a deal while also bringing in benefits in code size reduction. Not everyone is adopting it, but several major players have set the stage by mandating it.