I think it's great to play to one's strengths, but it's also true that what people perceive as "quick thinking" is often the result of very large amounts of practice. More specifically, people I know who are good at the types of skills described at the beginning of the article (mental math, witty responses, remembering facts, playing badminton to a high level) probably have a knack for them, but there are also types of underlying skills that aren't obvious to someone who hasn't spent a lot of time practicing the activity in question. I'll take two skills that I'm familiar with as cases in point: mental math and tennis (adjacent to badminton).

For mental math, there are all sorts of tricks that allow one to transform the problem into one with fewer values to hold in memory (for instance [1]). There are also lots of different patterns that allow shortcuts in calculation. The more of these one knows (kind of like facts in a trivia contest), the simpler many sorts of mental math problems become. And the more one has practiced, the faster one is at applying them. This is not to say that there aren't people who are exceptionally gifted, but it's also possible to be perceived as "quick-witted" by actually doing a lot of slow thinking ahead of time.

With tennis, sometimes it seems like players have exceptional reaction times (At the highest level, they certainly do!), but one learns over time to move to different areas of the court preemptively based on what the opponent is likely to do. This often shortens the distance one has to run by a step or two, which makes a pretty big difference in reaching difficult balls. Also, time spent practicing with better players who hit harder gradually changes one's perception of ball speed and one's ability to follow the ball all the way to the racket. It's like one's eyes get better, somehow. None of these perceptual changes or positioning habits happen overnight, but with enough stacked skills practiced over time, a person's reaction time appears to get faster even if their absolute reaction time hasn't improved.

Of course there are people with a higher skill ceiling than others, but I also think people write themselves off as being hopeless at something, choose not to practice, and then conclude that they are unsuited to the skill without having better understood what the road to "good" actually looks like.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trachtenberg_system