Yeah, a BIG part of this is the shift from giant network-owned properties which run well past 100 episodes and made a lot of money for everyone in syndication -- like ER, Law and Order, Grey's Anatomy, Friends, Frasier, X-Files, and those are just the ones at the top of my head -- to properties made by more than one company, which typically ends up with a lot of wrangling over who's going to pay and who's going to profit. This has been going on since way before Netflix -- the financing for Babylon 5 was always cobbled together at the last minute before TNT picked up the last season, a syndication deal and a deal for future shows/movies (and that fell apart anyway), and Farscape infamously ended on a cliffhanger because the Scifi network decided not to finance a fifth season before the fourth one finished airing. And that was in 2002. This problem has been festering for a long while, it's just that people were looking on Netflix as the saviour of shows that had been cancelled so there was the big mis-impression they weren't as driven by money. But a lot of European and British series have just never had this problem because they're typically financed and aired by one company/studio and have short closed-ended seasons, so a show can have seven or eight seasons, but maybe four or five eps a season. If anything, like you say, Netflix's shift from shows that are 22 episodes per season that run a minimum of five seasons to be "successfull" (i.e., that qualify for syndication on other channels) to shorter shows that have fewer seasons/episodes, is more like the BBC model. The creators of Stranger Things reportedly were happier with an 8-episode season they could treat as several "big movies" rather than trying to stretch their material out over 22 episodes. One major problem critics had with nearly ever Marvel show was they felt the seasons were too long -- and most of them were only 13 eps!

The other thing driving this is Netflix's shift from licensing other studios' content to creating its own. It's very unlikely Stranger Things will ever get the chop the way the Marvel shows did, because Netflix owns it. Of the long-running shows cited in the article, House of Cards wasn't cancelled until Spacey's crimes were publicly revealed (and he was fired days after the cancellation), and OITNB ended after seven seasons because a three-season renewal deal was up and the showrunner negotiated a new multi-year deal with Netflix for exclusive original shows (that happened right after Shonda Rhimes left ABC for an exclusive deal with Netflix reportedly worth $100M).

("I hear" was repeated 11 times in that article, once three times in one paragraph, and began way too many of them. That's usually a sign that the piece's editors seriously wanted to weasel the lead.)