You are talking about engineering IC's. The article is talking about Product Manager ICs which is far less complex to handle in an organization.

"elevated the non-manager career path"

This is misleading.

They opened up the doors to move up as Product Manager without needing to manage others. In other words MBA's and not the highly technical people (engineers - which is much harder to do). This isn't hard to do and shouldn't be treated as some significant accomplishment.