It’s not reality that’s the moat, though I can see how it’s tempting to frame it that way. And I don’t think the article’s conclusions are that far off. But I think the key is aggregation of past information in the form of experience and data. The more of the past influences your novel artifact, the more potential it has to have high fitness. The information-theoretic funnel can be narrow; it could be a single sentence like “avoid unnecessary third-party dependencies” or it could be a whole document about the intricacies of selling software to Japanese automakers. But the fact that the knowledge is sourced from a rich history of real events lets whatever you build with that navigate the solution space that much better.
Maybe companies will lean more on in-house solutions as code getting cheaper, building their own walled ecosystem. Fine-tunning their internal based on their findings. Keeping all the knowledge for themselves.
On the contrary, I think groups that adopt a share-alike approach will, counterintuitively, deepen their moat by increasing the amount of effective world-history-knowledge reflected in their systems. I thikn this will be true for the same reason that conditional-cooperation as a strategy is the optimal one in most iterated Prisoner's Dilemma games.