The article states, "Perhaps most importantly, the idea of mesh networking seems to be a fit with our current trend toward decentralization..."

I think this isn't really an accurate statement. The examples given in the article (Uber, airbnb, bitcoin) could reasonably be called "decentralized" (though, one could argue that in a case like airbnb, the fact that you go through a company means it isn't actually decentralized), but on the whole, I'd say the trend, for the bulk of the population, is actually towards more centralization. Think Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. More people are storing their data in fewer places, so I think the trend is the opposite of what the author states. In that sense, it's not at all surprising that mesh networking is not popular.