There's some wrong things in this article, and a thing worth mentioning.

Half-Life (and its mods like Counter-Strike) had Linux server versions, and a lot of dedicated servers ran on Linux, which I think is worth mentioning when talking about the history.

Steam wasn't well received at first, people didn't like that there was now this special launcher/downloader you had to use. Mind you they moved their old games onto Steam, so it's not like you knew about this when you bought it. Also there weren't any games on there except Half-Life and related titles, like HL mods that got their own release.

Contrary to what the article claims, MacOS does not support some outdated version of DirectX, it does not and never has supported DirectX at all. DirectX was only ever supported on Windows and XBox.

DirectX also was not well received at first. Here's an old article from gamedev.net (2002):

What later became known as DirectX 1.0 ended up not being very widely accepted. It was buggy, slow, badly structured, and overly complex.

Of course, Microsoft wasn't about to just give up. They kept working at it, asking the community for ways to improve it. The first truly viable version of DirectX was DirectX 3.0. A few years later, they released DirectX 5 (skipping 4 entirely), which was the first truly useful version. Incremental improvements were made with version 6. Then came DirectX 7.0.

DirectX 7 was the first one to actually be embraced by game developers. It worked well, making game programming reasonably easy, and a lot of people liked the interface.