These aren't really strawmen, they're more or less than mainstream opinion in the cognitive sciences from the 80s to maybe 2015-2020 or so.

Paul Smolensky is a cognitive science titan from that era. He worked with Hinton, Rumelhart, and McClelland on parallel distributed processing, and literally wrote the book on tensor product representations in cognition, with Geraldine Legendre: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516198/the-harmonic-mind-vol...

He's the axis of this particular group of researchers, being the most senior at the place where they all met, Johns Hopkins.

So this is less a straw man and more a quick reminder to his peers: "Right, so, remember this particular thread we've spent the last 40 years hashing out, here we've got another contribution to that particular conversation."

I’m aware, but it was a bad mainstream opinion which was contradicted by every bit of evidence ever since early LISP efforts in the late 1960s (still waiting for the release of SHRDLU 2.0!)

65 years is a long time to be beating your head against an obvious dead end.

The article intro presents the claims as self-evident, when they’re not at all.

But, someone rise pointed out this may have been a dig at those attitudes, which makes more sense.