This is funny because, very obviously, Jason Schreier doesn't know what he's talking about and he's way too dumb to realize it.
A "game engine", as used in discussions in forums and articles, IS NOT A PIECE OF TECH. Nor it is a "collection", as he says.
A game engine is an heuristic. It's a term in language that works like an umbrella and that encompasses the overall "look and feel" of playing a game. *Playing* it, not building it.
Of course the look of Morrowind or Oblivion doesn't PRECISELY correspond to the look of Skyrim or Fallout, but the analogies and the general feel are absolutely there. You could make an experiment and let someone play a Bethesda game without knowing it's Bethesda and he'll know, if he's competent, within minutes. And certainly not because that game would be very complex.
If an engine is an engine, then it provides a structure. No matter how much you WRESTLE it, the structure is a structure and by being structure it imposes itself and will create limits.
No matter how many times Bethesda explains how they rewrote everything in their engine, PLAYING those games will always reveal the truth. And the truth is that they are too scared to abandon the pipeline they used until this point because they cannot afford to wipe everything clean and restart from zero. Because IT IS indeed an engine, and they don't want to discard it.
And yet it's the same shit, as glaringly obvious to anyone who played even for 5 minutes. All Jason Schreier says falls apart right there because it is PROVEN by playing the game and realizing how the "engine" is still the same.
What Jason Schreier says is only vaguely correct in the sense that "engine" is not a word used precisely in this context. But it's only a discussion on the specific use and meaning of that word, and it doesn't even remotely touch the actual discussion that takes place when players criticize this "engine".