alt Hacker NewsI didn't have too much visibility in the CLNP world, although we did have a test network where I worked. My personal issue was that I just couldn't read the massively overwrought ISO specs. My admittedly biased viewpoint there wasn't anything really wrong with Ipv6, but the providers were quite happy with the way things were and actually kind of liked the internet-as-television model that we ended up with.
I do think that the IETF didn't realize that they were losing their agency, so its very likely that TUBA would have made the difference. not for any technical reason, but that it would have been a few years earlier when people were still listening.
I only read up on CLNP based on a fascination with counterfactuals. I will say there is a fair bit to IS-IS and ES-IS that's directly relevant to the original articles points on the circuits-to-bus-to-circuits physical evolution. There was no blanket assumption that the underlying layer look like Ethernet. The subnet equivalent was at a higher level and the assumptions were that there would be an actual network of links to manage.
The fact that IS-IS survived as a relevant IP routing protocol says a lot on its own.