On the other hand, you can in fact do a lot with a RPi4 with 1GB of RAM. For me, once you reach $100 I'd much rather get one of the NUC-like boxes.

The article mentions that author wanted to see if the orange pi 5 plus could be the successor to the Pi4.

Not so much a successor but an alternate path. I didn't want to get into pricing because a Pi (regardless of number) doesn't ship with a PSU, an NVMe slot, or even two 2.5GbE interfaces. It's not something I want to directly compare with price-wise, really (although I suspect adding up all the bits might be comparable...)