This article has some kernels of truth in it, but it throws the baby out with the bathwater.

The first line is "It's a myth that companies choose software based on user experience". One of the summary lines is "Pay at least as much attention to price and distribution as to UX." These are very different statements.

As a UX professional I do often lament how poorly designed products still gain a following. This happens more commonly in the enterprise space than in the consumer space, and that tide is inevitably shifting towards the latter.

There are reasons for usage of products with poor UX that are too long to go into here. One of them is that when a product concept is new "anything is better than nothing". Another is that if users are motivated, they will learn to use your painful MVP and then they won't want you to change it, since they already invested the time to learn it.

Also, the fact that there are "buyer" and "c-level" personas involved, does not mean that they trump all other personas. In a quality UX process, you track and design for those personas as well as other types of personas such as managers, shoppers, programmers, etc.

There seems to be a misconception here that UX is "all about the interface", or aesthetics, or "shopping experience", or whatever. The pricing model is part of the UX design. If the user can't get rapidly onboarded and try the product using their own data, then that is a flaw in the UX design and the business model hasn't been considered sufficiently.

Lastly, while enterprise products often get away with very poor usability due to their yearly recurring contracts and the existence of naive purchaser personas, consumer products are greatly influenced by end users who vote with their money. Figma is winning over Sketch because of a better UX. Amazon won in the end because it is extremely customer-focused and has a great UX for shopping, ordering and returning. While there are outliers, such as the Microsoft products you mention, forcing or coercing users to use your product may work in the short term and seldom works in the long term.