Pretty shit article. Anyone with a working brain knows the main reason is this one:

Which brings me to something that, to me, is the most overlooked point of all: the business model dictated the game's design before a single line of code was even written. An arcade cabinet only made money if you spent your coins fast

Contrary to what the author says, it is not an overlooked point. Any kid who has ever played an arcade knew the difficulty was bullshit on purpose. Not to mention that most boards let the owner change the difficulty and players wouldn't know any better.

Regarding controls, yes, home ports didn't have the entire hardware of big machines like Daytona USA, but most, if not all, side scrollers and top down games only needed 2-3 buttons - Final Fight, Aero Wings, Metal Slug, Ghosts 'n Goblins, TMNT, to name a few.

The lazy answer is always "weaker hardware at home." And sure, that's part of the story, but it's a small, almost surface-level part

The irony of stating this is that the very next paragraph is about how the SNES/Genesis hardware was weaker and didn't have the chips for some of tricks the CPS2 or NEO GEO pulled. The 3 paragraphs before the last are all about "weaker" hardware - physical limitations of the 16 bit consoles, "weaker" CRTs at home and finally, more "arcade boards had more chips to do more stuff". Literally half of the article is "the home hardware was weaker", hard to call it "surface-level part"

Oh, here's a fun fact: the Sharp X68000, a Japanese home/business computer of the 1980s, was what Capcom used to make some of their CPS1 games - said computer also had, at the time, the best home ports of said arcade games.