On some level this is just a technicality. When people talk about politics they almost always talk about bad politics because good politics doesn’t feel like politics. It just feels like things are working correctly.

It is a technicality, but an important one IMO, because using bad terminology causes unnecessary confusion. I would definitely say that most of what the article describes as "good politics" is not politics at all, but more like just the soft skills part of a normal engineering job.