MS has bought some studios, but we still have to see if they can provide anything on the scale of Bloodborne or Spider-Man...It seems like just having some first-party studios is enough to compete with some of the strongest games in the market, but the sad reality is that right now we only have things like Crackdown 3 or Sea of Thieves to gauge against. Sure, Ori, Killer Instinct and Cuphead were amazing but they´re on a much smaller scale than Horizon or TLoU. The only heavy hitters MS has are Forza, Gears and Halo, and they all have been losing steam through the years. No matter how you look at it, the gap in first-party games between Sony and MS has only widened in the last gen and the trend seems to be that it´s growing even wider.
And that´s without even going into what it´s like to work for MS. We´ve seen how Rare has fallen from the top after the MS acquisition, or how P* had its´ more ambitious game cancelled. It may not have been MS fault, but just look at the glowing previews Astral Chain is getting and the repeated comments from both Nintendo and P* on how great it´s to work with each other. Now, contrary to history we have to believe that all these newly bought studios are going to up their game under MS´ umbrella and release stuff that can compete with God Of War or Uncharted...remember that both Ori and Cuphead were well under development when MS got their hands on them. Maybe this time MS will give freedom, resources and provide a nice environment to nurture these studios so they can give the best they have, but even then it´s delusional to think that right of the bat they´ll be releasing juggernauts that can compete with Sony´s offerings. Uncharted, TLoU, GoW...all come from studios that are mature and have spent many years refining their structure, tools, procedures...Just like BotW or Mario Odyssey were only possible because Nintendo capitalized on all the previous work that paved the way before them.
The article also disregards completely that XBox is almost irrelevant outside of the US.