I think this article is really talking about two things: the trappings of cyberpunk as a look, and the story structure (and perhaps world-view) that, it claims, all the “punk” books use.
Firstly, the visual style of cyberpunk – mirrored shades, lone hackers, shiny skyscrapers and so on – is retro and, I suspect, the future won’t look all that much like it. So, games like Cyberpunk 2077 are tapping into a vision of the future that is now gone, in the same way that the 1950s view of the future, with silver clothes and rayguns, is gone (interestingly, William Gibson wrote a story about this called “The Gernsback Continuum”). Something a bit like it might happen in the future, perhaps, but it would require certain aspects of technology and fashion to stay the same or go backwards, which isn’t entirely unfeasible. There are many fax machines and no mobile phones in Neuromancer, for instance.
Secondly, and more interestingly, the one-good-man-against-the-world story structure is simply noir. It’s not quite Western, where the hero is taming a lawless (but not inherently corrupt) world, nor is it Grimdark, where the hero would be corrupted by the setting or would be corrupt to begin with. However, I think the story structure that the article describes is almost exactly the same as, say, the background of every Raymond Chandler novel. Marlowe, Chandler’s hero, is a good man in a corrupt city, who uses his skills to bend the rules and solve cases. However, he lacks the power to change the system in which he lives (and he’s too morally upright to get involved in it) which, as the article says, sets him up for sequels. (Orwell once observed that Charles Dickens wanted the world to be a better place, but couldn't imagine how it would work better other than to just put nicer people in charge of the same system. There might be an element of this, too.)
In fairness, I’m biased here: the two fantasy novels I’ve just written work in exactly the same way, and I see them as noir. I suppose the risk is that the story stops being about the tech, and could be told anywhere: the hacking computer could be a lockpick or a magic spell, depending on the circumstances. But I don’t see a great problem with this. Firstly, a lot of stories could be set in various places: Rogue One and Where Eagles Dare are pretty similar in terms of ideas, just exist in different settings. Also, a lot of SFF is sold these days as being an awesome emotional adventure (“Which characters would you like to see getting together?” etc) rather than the rather cold exploration of future technology that it used to be.
For a long time, there was considerable discussion among fans of steampunk as to what exactly the “punk” meant. Was it anti-establishment or inherently political? The answer, at least in the UK, appears to be “no”. Most people take it to mean – in as much as they give it a clear meaning – “mixed up”. It's also worth pointing out that a lot of steampunk isn't anti-establishment or self-consciously "progressive": it enables writers to produce stories about explorers and the like in the style of Haggard or Conan Doyle, but to avoid the real-world trappings that would follow if they were set in reality. That sort of story seems far removed from the set-up that the article is talking about.
