The article says that but it's overcomplicating to the point of being actually wrong. You could, I suppose, argue that the big innovation is the application of vectorization to the chain rule (by virtue of the matmul-based architecture of your usual feedforward network) which is a true combination of two mathematical technologies. But it feels like this and indeed most "innovations" in ML is only considered as such due to brainrot derived from trying to take maximal credit for minimal work (i.e., IP).

The real metric is whether anyone remembers it in 100 years. Any other discussion just comes off as petty.