I note for those who don't get to the bottom, there are comments there that suggest the author of the post you linked is incorrect. I'm not qualified to know who is right.

Both comments are speculative.

Are people, in general, aware that MySQL employs a pluggable storage engine? I wonder if much of the confusion about MySQLs abilities stems from arguments from people aware of it against those that have only ever used the stock engines.

Most people use the default storage engine, without really thinking about it, but almost every project I've worked with recommends innodb - not sure why.

There's no surprise it became the default storage engine instead of myisam around early ver 5.5 or so, it is superior to myisam in many ways.

Personally I like the row level locks and the way it can enforce foreign keys, which myisam can't do.