With the headscratching exception of their communication, Tesla can walk and chew gum at the same time. Since basically every automaker is working on this, they'll need "self-driving" features to continue to be competitive as a car company. Electric alone isn't enough.
That said, this Verge article spent a lot of words to say not much. The author seems to be in a tech "journalist" bubble. Without really understanding much about technology, his job is to regularly come up with things to write about. Outside of the TMC and tech blog bubble, the general public isn't thinking much about this technology, and when they do they figure it will arrive many years from now. So I feel like the author is venting more his personal frustration of having to write another self-driving car article where the improvements are too subtle to make interesting copy, rather than describing some real problem.