I do not know if anyone ever thought that xrp would be the same as bitcoin or would be the next bitcoin but just by looking at the two, the differences are too noticeable. If you want to ever compare an altcoin (or god forbid a memecoin) to bitcoin, just write it out and notice how foolish you sound.
This narrative is done long time ago and whoever is that author of that article is free to say whatever they want to say. But when I say that it's long time ago, it actually means it was. They can make a good read of articles when comparing Bitcoin to any next to it like XRP sounding that they're genius behind that. Although they cannot really fool people who have been here for quite a while because it's all understandable that they just want to make people satisfy who holds it that they have some thing to believe. Well, it's not believable to us but to them, it might be a motivation that they are going to think of and will increase the value because of that false narrative.