Stolen article aside, this article is silly. It's like saying Derivatives aren't successful because most people don't own them or understand them.
One path to success would be to have a billion people using Bitcoin regularly. That would be fantastic, and true to the vision of what Bitcoin was meant to be.
But there are plenty of other paths to "move forward" (whatever that actually means). A single mega-rich investor wanting to park his funds somewhere with comparatively low inflation (and potentially away from the prying eyes of the tax authorities) could hugely drive the price of Bitcoin up. More likely, companies will build platforms on top of Bitcoin and customers will end up using Bitcoin and the Blockchain without even knowing it. Kind of like how most people use the internet without ever knowing with TCP and UDP are. Remittance companies are a great example of this -- I give them money, they make it appear at the other end, in a different currency. Bitcoin can be the facilitation layer, but I don't need to care.
And as we continue to see financial crisis after crisis, more bail-ins, smart money is going to start finding it's way to places that can't be stolen. Your mom isn't using bitcoin because for her needs, credit cards work just as well (if not better). So why would she? But give people the right incentives...
From a success metric standpoint, I believe Bitcoin is much less likely to fail for the factors mentioned in the article, and more likely to fail through competition with other cryptocurrencies, some of which might eventually outshine it.