A lot of people are making a big of deal out of this article yet it says so little about the named "friendly fork".
First of all, it's not even decided if it's a state fork or a code fork which makes a whole lot of different behind the motivation of the fork.
Secondly, knowing James Hancock personally, this fork is purely for allowing development of ETH 1.x improvements in a real-world environment, you can create testnets for days but there is nothing like seeing the real implications of a monetized network.
Finally, Ethereum is extremely quick at adopting improvements once they are battle tested. The biggest motivation IMO for this fork is the lack of attention ETH 1.x due to the focus on ETH 2.0.