I felt like the original article's way of phrasing this is slightly misleading, maybe based on confusion on the author's part. As other commenters here have made clear, OSM specifically intends to allow commercial and other downstream uses, but you have to host the tiles yourself or pay someone else to host them. That's certainly different from other services and may involve much more up-front effort and infrastructure, but it absolutely intends to create a meaningful option for mapping tools that can be used in commercial sites.

(Having said this, when I once had to do a one-off mapping project for a colleague, I found the OSM tools pretty daunting as a beginner, even though I appreciated how they'd reward effort with customizability and extensibility. I could certainly imagine that a lot of sites wouldn't be prepared to set up this toolset, and I realize that OSM doesn't provide a simple drop-in replacement for Google Maps that can be used by commercial sites.)