A novel also is produced by a “herd”. There are a lot of people involved. People that make suggestions, corrections, the editor... It’s not a single person effort.
Naked Came the Stranger was written, not just produced, by a herd, to massive success. (It was intended to fail, and the herd writing was an element of that intention, but none of that stopped it from experiencing massive success.)
See also: Atlanta Nights, another sort of "successful failure" group-written project meant to demonstrate that an alleged "publisher" was really a vanity press with no actual standards or editorial process. You can now buy the book via various links from the official website of the "author" [1], but in case you're in need of a few giggles right this minute, the submitted manuscript was also released by one of the conspirators [2].
The single person is the one who does the conception and creation.
That proof-readers, editors, etc work on it too is inconsequential.
TFA didn't say more than one person can't contribute something or work an artistic project. It said that one or a very few people have the direction and the overall command and vision -- e.g. the opposite of "community process" or "design by committee".
However, you can still read a novel the same after someone else makes corrections or add things, even if the new things are not good.
Software can become complete broken by a bad patch.
That is seen the best at security issues. Like someone thinks it is a good idea to add a heartbeat extension to ssl. A basically pointless extension, if you have a novel with a pointless appendix from an editor, basically no one would read the appendix and it does not matter that it is there. But with software it ruins the entire server security completely
It is better to pass on 100 good patches than risking one bad patch
