I reject that for simple reasons of linear time. The GFC happened in 2008 and Dodd-Frank passed in 2010. Since then, there have been no large, notable regulations passed and Dodd-Frank was watered down a bit in 2018.

While Sarbanes-Oxley did make it substantially harder for small companies (market cap <$1B) to go public, there was a wave of very affordable and notable IPOs throughout the 2010s - Tesla at $2B, Shopify at $1B, Square at $3B, LinkedIN at $4B, etc. All of these have now grown substantially since their IPOs, with Square (absolute dog) being worth 10x their IPO. So yes, SOX killed micro-IPOs, but GFC/Dodd-Frank did not kill affordable IPOs.

Now, you're right that IPOs have grown a lot more expensive over time, but you're absolutely wrong to attribute it to increased regulations post GFC. The actual answer is much more closely related to what the article is talking about - VCs realized how much growth and returns they were leaving on the table and there has been substantial pressure on firms to stay private as long as possible, as well a huge increase in larger rounds and private credit. In fact, rather than increased regulations, there has been a loosening of regulations that allow investors to use SPVs (and SPVs of SPVs, and SPVs of SPVs of SPVs, a veritable matrioshka of SVPs) to get around the maximum number of shareholders a private company can have.

I have seen this first-hand - part of my investing strategy was to blindly buy cheap tech IPOs and that got me some great returns, but this strategy no longer works, because the VCs have effectively managed to hoover up any decent returns retail investors could get. Today you gotta be on AngelList or other platforms (only qualify investors, obviously, more exclusion) buying secondaries if you want decent returns.