alt Hacker NewsGiven that GCC was first released in 1987, that would mean that tail call optimization, including of indirect calls, has been around for more than half of GCC's lifetime. So it's indeed fair for the parent article to say that "[GCC has] had tail-call optimizations for most of [its] existence".
That is not exactly true, because for a long time tail call optimizations had a lot of restrictions in gcc, so they could be used only seldom.
What is said in TFA is correct in the sense that only in recent years the support for tail call optimization became good enough to be able to rely on it, if you use appropriate compilation options.