The point in the article was to prefer composition over inheritance, which is sort of like using OOP “the right way”. It didn’t discourage OOP as a whole, nor do I think it should - making a game without objects would be a nightmare.

Plenty of games were made using plain C and even Assembler.

What is really needed are not objects in a OOP sense, but a way to make a mutable, composite data type. Else you would have to pass tens of arguments to even simplest of functions.

"Making the item system polymorphic was ultimately a mistake" is so far from "OOP was a mistake" that it's not even funny.