Assembly lines give you GREAT control over where the code is located, how it's lit (consistently), and what you do on read error (can't shunt off the passenger to a read error bin, so they don't hold up the line). Rotational angle doesn't matter, perspective skew does. And then - it's a leaf of paper, so you get folds and obscured parts (yes, correctable...up to a point).
Assembly lines are dirty, full of parasites and with broken lights all the time.
We can create live deep fakes or detect complex objects in live feeds of random webcams.
We certainly can correct a few shadows and distortions on a flat piece of paper we formatted, showing a basic symbol we designed and printed, pushed against a sensor we control, on a device we can light and shape the way we want.
NFC fails as well, you can fold the ticket just and it will break the antena.
Of course if it's a reusable ticket on a rigid medium, it won't happen. But neither for QRCode.
None of that matter. QR code can be read on any angle because of the 3 position detection patterns it comes with, by design.
Lighting conditions are not a problem on tickets (which is what the article is about) because you can illuminate the paper from the camera.
QRCode were fast on assembly lines two decades ago. They were invented in the nineties, at a time where we had slow processors and shitty cameras.