I don't think this article is primarily about free markets vs. government planning. It's about the ability of humans - any humans - to make conscious collective

I don't think this article is primarily about free markets vs. government planning. It's about the ability of humans - any humans - to make conscious collective decisions about how the economy works in ways motivated by things other than finding profit, versus treating the economy as a mostly-uncontrollable force optimizing for what it optimizes for (the "invisible hand"). I think that's what the author means by "the spontaneous interplay of individual economic units" - that if a potential profit advantage exists, some rational actor will spring up to take advantage of it. The idea that this sort of thing happens reliably and consistently is behind theories like the efficient market hypothesis, for instance. There's little profit advantage in being the first company to shift to remote work or in proactively closing your coffee shop while there may still be a trickle of customers, but people did it. (For that matter, there's little profit advantage in being a videoconferencing service that has its average customer use the service occasionally suddenly use the service full-time for all its employees, and yet multiple such products of the market not only embraced it but built up their free offerings, too.) If your claim is that the free market isn't constrained to being motivated by profit and can decide, even (or especially) if not ordered by government, to accomplish some other goal - I think you have no real disagreement with the author. What the author is claiming is novel is that people know that this is true, now.