I haven't seen much of business owners being ornery like the article describes, but there's other challenges:

Business owners (thinking SMBs) tend to have a holistic view of their entire business, to know what everything costs, how the numbers work out, etc., and to personally feel the risk. They also generally don't have a lot of time to invest in changes, and may not want to delegate too much. And they know that a lot of vendors are full of poo.

(Source: Our anti-counterfeiting slash supply chain integrity startup ended up working with major brands, but we also tried small businesses (e.g., designer who had their own production line of huge CNC machines in their studio). We tried tailoring solutions to some of these upscale small businesses, but in the end we only ended up getting money from large enterprise prestige brands. Enterprise sales, OTOH, is a painful and risky slog of numerous stakeholders, foot-dragging dependencies, opaque politics, changing priorities, etc.)