They exist purely to handle control pads imho and the article doesn't mention that. That's when they first started appearing, Secret of Mana, noted in the article was a SNES game.
They do not exist to benefit mouse+kb users. Mouse+kb users are absolutely better off imho with an always on and hotkeyed action bar down the bottom/side. If you don't know the hotkey you can still flick the mouse over and back faster than activating a radial menu.
When you see a radial menu in a PC game you can bet it's because the game had consoles in mind first and foremost.
Fortnite's emote wheel is a good counter-example - it wouldn't be easy to implement in any other way. You don't want to dedicate 8 separate buttons just for emotes, and any form of a linear list of options would be hard for players to learn via muscle memory.
An emote wheel with 8 options makes it easy to remember - press some key to emote, then drag down to play emote X, or up for emote Y. As an added bonus, it works well with directional control pads, but that's not the primary benefit.
Maya's had radial menus as a major chunk of its UI for ages, and there are people who use them as a major chunk of their mouse-and-keyboard interaction with it. Blender's got 'em too.
Wacom's tablet drivers let you build radial menus for your programs. I've never bothered as I'm a "five thousand keyboard shortcuts" kind of artist but there are artists who love 'em.
Speaking as an aspiring solo gamedev: these extra menus in programs like Blender are super important.
Sure, you can map extra keybinds, but convenient keybinds are actually a scarce resource if you're essentially the "full stack" of the art pipeline (from sculpting, modeling, retopology, texture painting, to animating). This isn't even including keybinds for any custom tooling.
One thing I really appreciate about Blender specifically is that you can search through all the available operations with F3. This offers a nice trade-off between muscle memory, keybind consumption, and not needing to use the mouse.
Crysis 1 had a radial menu for suit modes that was pretty good. It was not designed with consoles in mind. The console ports of that game only released 4 years later.
It was actually a very good solution for minimizing binds. Yes, using direct hotkeys is better, but most players in a playerbase are pretty casual and usability is more important.
Cad software uses radial menus for right click selections often (solid works, inventor). Apex legends uses radial menus for weapon selection with a mouse.
Have you seen the videos of what you can do with radial menus in The Last Of Us 2? Search youtube for "ellie plays", and the name of a famous guitar song. You can basically free-play a guitar on there. A good guitarist with a little bit of practice can play reasonable versions of just about any song, using a playstation controller.
I love these radial menus in games, specifically the non-hierarchical type best represented in the article via the “Grand Theft Auto V (2013)” example.
They are extremely common these days and I think for good reason, if you utilize multiple modifier keys for different wheels then you can provide a ton of options with two key combos (modifier + action) or one key + directional and they are removed from the UI when you don't need them.
I vastly prefer them over icons with hotkeys or other solutions.
I was disappointed the article didn't answer one question I've had for a while:
Which game first used radial menus that mapped directly onto the analog stick / joycon? That is, the angle of the stick maps directly to the angle of the selected item on the radial menu? This way you can immediately select any item, as well as switch from any current selection to any arbitrary new selection.
I first saw this in Horizon: Zero Dawn, but I haven't played many console games.
Contrast this with the Secret of Mana games where you have to repeatedly press the D-pad arrows to cycle to the desired menu item — in that style, the radial nature of the menu is entirely cosmetic.
A friend of mine was a Program Manager on Xbox that worked on some HCI projects like the original Kinect.
He told me there was once an experimental keyboard that used the two thumbsticks on an Xbox controller like a dual radial menu to input text - the left thumbstick would select a character group, and the right thumbstick would input a character from that group.
The learning curve was deemed too steep for the average customer, but apparently those who spent enough time using the prototype were able to type an order of magnitude faster than with traditional on-screen keyboards.
The memory sticks out as an amusing idea, and potentially a really cool "power-user" input modality for game controllers.
One note: having the numpad activate the radial menu is very useful (assuming it's not a game that requires constant hand-on-mouse), but this leads to different numbering than the otherwise-more-common angle-based numbering. Probably fortunately, phone upside-down number pads are obsolete as controls.
As a result, actions can gain keybindings like 1379, while remaining fully discoverable.
They do not exist to benefit mouse+kb users. Mouse+kb users are absolutely better off imho with an always on and hotkeyed action bar down the bottom/side. If you don't know the hotkey you can still flick the mouse over and back faster than activating a radial menu.
When you see a radial menu in a PC game you can bet it's because the game had consoles in mind first and foremost.