It is well worth the read. My favorite game as well.
It shows you why they were so successful with FF7 as opposed to some of the more recent FF, IMO. The developers created the game they wanted. The game they knew fans would love. It was more artistic. The games they create now in the FF series are both very attractive aesthetically and have cool bells and whistles but it always feel like they are playing it safe.
It was a lot more than just that. At the time a normal game dev team was about 20 people, and for Square it was 30-40. For the development of FFVII they expanded to 150 people (note: those numbers are from the interview, but the article comments other people so it may have been different). They spent $21 million (that's in 90's $$$) on new graphics hardware and software, buying workstations at $70,000 a piece and $500,000-$1,000,000 servers.
And this was all made possible because Sony being new in the console industry rolled out the red carpet for them. They gave Square a sweetheart deal, basically forgoing the cut the console maker gets for each game sale, and told Square they'd put their effort into the marketing. Final Fantasy VI only sold 400,000 copies in North America, so Square with Sony' backing spent $20M on marketing in NA banking on reaching a million sales, something no PS game had achieved to date. From a technical side Sony was also keeping some of the dev kit locked down, but opened up and let Square have full access to get what they needed.
So yes while Square had their full artistic merit behind the game they also had the perfect storm of getting the full backing of an industry giant trying to enter a new market at a time when new tech allowed for disruptive game innovation. I'm not trying to discredit what Square accomplished with their own ambition and merit, but it likely wouldn't have been possible to the same extend if they didn't have Sony fully backing them. Which also gave them several steps up on the competition who were still producing 2D sprite based RPG's, something Square had been considering for FFVII before Sony stepped in.
That's the part I found really fascinating with the article, how with the rockstar treatment it all just came together like that.