That review from February 1998, was many months prior to Unreal and other texture heavy games so of course they couldn't spot that difference.
One of the more texture heavy games in that time were dense multiplayer games of Quake2 as there'd be unique skins loaded for everybody, new levels with new complexity with new lightmaps to keep track of, and still a ton of unoptimization regarding weapon and item models (made worse with vweps since the point release patches that shortly followed).
Battlezone's "large assets" were made for those 12MB Voodoo2s in mind.
Not sure why you see 12MB V2's an upside for Quake3 as it's noted to also run horribly there at picmip 0 (which Banshee/V3 handles much better)