I gave a quick look at the article so it's probably my fault - can anyone explain to me why this are not just a new iteration of the concept of Portlet (1) which was supposed to totally renovate etc. etc. ...
I had the pleasant of designing and implementing a portlet application back in 2005 - 2006 circa in Java with JSR164 (I may put the wrong JSR here). Initially, I thought portlet concept was very cool and could be a game changer. After a year or so working with it, my opinion changed: it was so convoluted, needlessly. If the goal is to shift the rendering responsibility to the portlet service owner then you could have used client side rendering with AJaX as well (remember AJAX?)
In the end, I think what really killed the portlet development is the complication it causes when you have to maintain states among the portlets.
That was my thought as well. This looks like client-side portlets as a pattern without ties to a particular technology framework. I'm not sure that is a great idea as a prescriptive way to design most things, but maybe it is a good conceptual way of understanding some fairly common designs out there (eg, Amazon.com).
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Portlet_Specification