LLMs are clearly useful, even if flawed; conversely, the author had to struggle to find uses of Cyc. Additionally, neural networks were already showing promise before the scale-ups; AlexNet was trained on consumer hardware and outperformed all other solutions to date.
I see your point, and I agree that the way that paragraph was initially posed was perhaps more dismissive than it should have been... but to disprove it, you need proof that Cyc was a working approach for anything, and said proof appears to be lacking.