You could make a lot of those claims going back further. In my earnest effort to try and find the goal of learning the Taekwondo Poomsae, one thing that I read is the Karate Kata were watered down from their original martial intent to something more appropriate to teach to a schoolchild. For example, a motion where you cross your arms and then pull your arms to either side could be breaking someone's neck...or it could be a knife-hand block.
If you define a martial art only as what you need to survive, then anything done to make a martial art more appropriate for children's education, or for competition, is watering it down. This is true, but also a narrow view of martial arts. It's the same narrow view as someone who says that only sport arts are effective, because you can't win in a non-sport art. It's the same narrow view as I had when I started teaching under my Master's guidance, and I thought everything my Master wanted me to do was wrong because it's not the way I wanted to teach.
Now, as to this author - he suffers from two problems. He doesn't seem to know a lot of what he's talking about, and he can't write. He is talking about Krav Maga, but the bulk of his article talks about Japan. His introduction didn't really draw me in or tell me what kind of point he was going to make. When he started talking about animals and how mammals were the biggest and strongest, I was confused, because there were lots of animals bigger than mammals in the past (until I realized that he was talking about when humans first started learning martial arts). It's just a big jumble that he wrote to sell his martial arts school.
It reminds me of watching a video of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, where he says it's the best martial art because it's about NOT simply trading punches. Which ignores arts like wrestling and Judo, which are also not about trading punches; and ignores lots of Asian martial arts that mix grappling with punching and try to make it so you can strike your opponent without them striking you. More arts are about not trading punches than are about trading punches, but according to this advertisement, it's only GJJ.
