Ultimately the HIGs are only meaningful as a starting point for a design. You should user-test your UI and figure out whether any changes you come up with are actually an improvement over the baseline.
In that sense, the only meaningful arguments in the article are that when they A/B and user-tested hamburger menus versus the alternatives, the hamburger menus were worse. Experimental errors and implementation errors in their hamburger menu aside, they were correct to stick with the UI that tested better, even if it defied Android or Apple's HIGs in one way or another.
Apple compiles and publishes their HIG because they benefit from platform consistency and it helps with branding & learnability, but third party developers don't benefit just from following the guidelines. The guidelines are a tool you use to try and get a consistent, learnable UI, and then you deviate as necessary to build something your customers actually enjoy using.
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Ultimately the HIGs are only meaningful as a starting point for a design. You should user-test your UI and figure out whether any changes you come up with are actually an improvement over the baseline.
In that sense, the only meaningful arguments in the article are that when they A/B and user-tested hamburger menus versus the alternatives, the hamburger menus were worse. Experimental errors and implementation errors in their hamburger menu aside, they were correct to stick with the UI that tested better, even if it defied Android or Apple's HIGs in one way or another.
Apple compiles and publishes their HIG because they benefit from platform consistency and it helps with branding & learnability, but third party developers don't benefit just from following the guidelines. The guidelines are a tool you use to try and get a consistent, learnable UI, and then you deviate as necessary to build something your customers actually enjoy using.