Well daily dose of dumb quota just got filled reading that article.
The reality of gamedev is, the gamer, doesnt care, how you develop your game. As it should be.
No one cares what api is used, if you used a for loop instead of for each. You can look at those things, but at that point something was done right. Quake1 might have been a technical showcase, but its not anymore and people still play it. While it helped, theres still a good game underneath the tech.
If a game sucks, how you use your hardware will be last on the list of complaints. Khm Godfall khm..
A game was always "a vision" of a world, story, mehanics... An idea. How you realise it, no one could give 2 shits about, how well you realise that vision, thats what matters.
And yea software rendering has a place, even new build engine games are made and lots of pixelart games, filtered games that still look pixelated, but thats nothing to do with what technical approach is better, its more of a design decision and thats what matters.