I feel like the fact that that was 334 planes dropping 1665 tons of mostly 500lb bombs over the course of a night is an important distinction from a single bomb that does the same damage.

Not really as even with WWII tech the bombs could target specific areas. A nuclear bomb is more destructive for a few blocks around the blast, but get a couple miles out in the city and the damage is much less than a smaller bomb hit.

Modern military doctrine is hitting a whole city is bad. You want to hit specific targets and not collateral damage to other things. Discredited WWII doctrine was killing civilians would make them surrender so hitting the whole city was good. Which lens you look at military doctrine says which is better.

Obviously there are huge differences and it ushered in a new era of weaponry. What I want to point out is that atomic weapons were not an immediate step-change in destructive power. They’re actually not an exception to the greater point the author was making.

The destruction caused by a single military operation was in the same league. The logistics were actually harder in some ways than traditional bombing. It would be months before the US would have more atomic weapons after the first two. So the one bomb versus hundreds doesn’t make a big difference when you have zero.

This would all change dramatically over the coming years. But at the time of its first use, the atomic bomb was not as much of a leap forward in capability as you’d probably think.