When people cite the great feat of putting in a 100Wh battery into this laptop they seem to keep forgetting that the 2012-2014 models had a 95Wh battery and the 2015 model had a 99.5Wh battery.
Only when flattening the design for the 2016 year did they reduce it to 76Wh.
For the longest time the iPhones were getting thinner and thinner and hn/reddit complained that they really wanted chunkier iPhones with better batteries.
Then Apple turned the battleship and since 2014 (iPhone 6) we've gotten a thicker phone with improved battery life in every redesign.
Some ruggedized laptops have two separate batteries for hot-swapping while keeping the PC on, and this way you can take a laptop with more than 100 Wh on a plane. The same way I take a 95 Wh laptop with a 75 Wh power bank. So never say never :)
As long as consumers are willing to shell out several thousand dollars per iteration of mistake-undoing then it's likely that some day you'll see actual progress.
The article mentions the new keyboard right in the subheader, multiple times in the first couple paragraphs, and has a whole section devoted to it.
TL;DR: Yes, it's a completely new keyboard design, with scissor switches, not butterfly, more key travel, slightly more key separation, more offset for the Touch Bar, and a physical escape key and separate Touch ID sensor.
You are going to have to put up with people asking about the keyboard for a while. They've been blowing smoke up our asses for two years about how they 'fixed' the old one. 4 revisions in it's... better, but still reminiscent of the sorts of keyboards that nobody would buy after trying.
The reaction is going to be, "Yeah, I know they said they fixed the keyboard, but really, did they fix the keyboard?" from quite a lot of people.
Only when flattening the design for the 2016 year did they reduce it to 76Wh.