Well it is wrong. There is something wrong with having two subtly (depending on how subtle it is) different tools. There's duplication of effort, community split, interoperability hassles (depending on the something), extra support burden if other people have to support both, etc.
I don't think anyone would agree that having 110V, 220V, 50Hz and 60Hz is good. Or subtly different railway gauges. Or Windows and Unix style line endings.
There are a couple of upsides too - increased competition, backup in case one project goes in a crazy direction, etc.
But it's silly to pretend there's nothing bad about it.
Though anyway in this case I think "a marvel ahead of its time" is not a "subtle difference".
roxen and apache were not two subtly different tools, they were, and still are, miles apart. the way you use them and develop for them is completely different. roxen not only replaces apache but also perl, php or any other language that you develop your websites with. therefore roxen does not even compete with apache, but it also competes with laravel, django or rails. the fact that those later frameworks need apache to serve their content is rather incidental.
rails was first released in 2004. django in 2005, laravel in 2011. i used roxen (and it's predecessor spinner) in 1994!! that's literally a decade earlier. i think the only possibly competing tool available at the time was cl-http in lisp[0]. (AIDA/Web for smalltalk was created in 1996, as was WebObjects, Java EE came in 1999. that's all i could find so far)
[0]: at the time i was looking for a better alternative to the available ncsa and cern webservers. i remember ordering a student version or something like that of franz lisp so i could try it. and i was put off by having to write lisp code just to serve static files. that was what made me keep looking until i found spinner.
the ability to try different approaches to solve the same problem
avoiding lengthy arguments over how to implement a feature
the ability to take risks in the development
...
imagine we'd all be stuck with sendmail or perl.
of course when you get to the 10th video editor it starts getting ridiculous. there certainly are some areas where i wish some projects could join forces to create better results.
I don't follow; are you implying Linux users (the particular audience) don't like having multiple tools for specific use cases or that the author's statement goes without saying?
Often when there are two (or more) very good tools for a single task (e.g. editing text) there breaks out a Holy War, rather than people being happy for each other to use their preferred, each excellent in their own way, option. Seems to me this is what the parent comment is nodding to.
It's amusing that this needs to be said when writing for a particular audience.