It feels like this article is kind of burying the lead: it doesn't mention PSNow once (then again, maybe the answer is to pretend it never happened, like that console that came out between the Wii and the Switch, the Something-U? What was it?), and mentions about Gaikai for one sentence. Sony came to the cloud gaming space first, and failed catastrophically, despite every advantage and huge install base to work from. They failed so badly that they killed more than half the platforms PSNow was supported on (including all Sony televisions), then waited three years and killed it off completely when they felt no one was looking; that was the same service Sony advertised before their films in theaters as "the future is here, now."
Sony wishes PSNow did "only" as badly as Xbox One, because it might not have literally had to scrap everything and try again from the start like they did. They definitely have to try much, much harder than Microsoft has to, because they already have one huge failure under their belt (haha, great, now I sound like an article on this website!). Microsoft as pretty obviously imitated Sony trying to play catch-up extensively in the past (whether that will work, who knows)--considering the new Playstation library service is...basically just Game Pass without first-party games, that seems to be what they're trying to do.
I'm not sure "XCloud"/Xbox Game Streaming will ever really gain a foothold. I doubt the 30 million Game Pass subscribers (if we believe Sony's word in court, anyway) are drawn by its specific functionality. Meanwhile, Sony, the company with a massive lead in installation hardware (2 to 1, or even 3 to 1, just as the article said!) failed to reach even that modest level of acceptance, killed everything off, and is trying again. That sounds a lot less like "leapfrogging" and a lot more like "desperately playing catchup" (why, aside bragging rights, I'm not sure, and I'm not convinced Sony knows why either). Still, at long as its not the start-to-finish disaster PSNow was, PSN users will only benefit (so long as Sony doesn't give up again, but that's what refunds are for, right?).