In general, yes, but I think he does miss one important point about very early play. When I was playing OD&D - I had been playing crude, tabletop wargames for some time based on books I had borrowed from the local library by Don Featherstone and Charles Grant and others - we didn't use metal miniatures, as such, because they were expensive and not that easy for us to get hold of. But this doesn't mean we were playing (what would now be called) "theatre of the mind"; we used dice, tiddleywinks, Airfix figures and other stuff to represent characters and monsters. This was nothing revolutionary; I/we had been using DIY stuff for wargames for some while - I remember painstakingly drawing top-down 'figures' of Greek hoplites and Macedonian cavalrymen on pieces of cardboard in my bedroom, as a kid, so that I could play ancient wargames with them.
Just because we didn't have minis doesn't mean that the idea of having no physical representation of "where folks were" seemed viable to us at all. I still remember a scene in a classroom where a model dragon (provided by the DM, who had an actual fantasy wargame army in metal minis!) took pride of place, surrounded and being assaulted by a motley selection of dice, Airfix Romans and Ancient Britons and a few chits of card... The dragon's treasure was a piece of card coloured with gold crayon, and the cave outline was, I think, drawn on a sheet of art paper with a marker pen. Fairly sophisticated, really, considering this must have been around 1976.
