Now, it's almost impossible to mine bitcoin solo, but it's not that small miners are out of the business. Small miners can join mining pools.
It is a known fact arguing at this point does not make any difference as it is known Bitcoin mining is not that easy as it used to be 4 years back for small miners.
The article you shared doesn't say anything about why blocks can take more than 10 minutes to be mined.
Quoting from the article
The network difficulty, already constantly increasing, has further increased significantly, making the creation of new blocks more expensive and complex.