Indeed. You've now taken one solution off the table. The other one is for the build system to become a compiler, which is equally unacceptable. That leaves you with manually encoding all dependency information in the build files. Which most people aren't doing (the exception being Bazel-like build systems which enforce that).
That seems to leave us with just one conclusion: the article is right, and most of the ecosystem will never migrate to modules, leaving us with the worst of both worlds.
That seems to leave us with just one conclusion: the article is right, and most of the ecosystem will never migrate to modules, leaving us with the worst of both worlds.