I'm pretty sure I hate everything about that article. Let's start with the basic problem that most relates to the passage you quoted: the Ottoman Empire didn't collapse.

The Ottoman Empire, uniquely among the three large, multi-ethnic autocratic empires in the war (i.e. the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Austria-Hungary) did not politically collapse over the course of the war as Russia did in 1917 or or Austria-Hungary in 1918. Nor did the Ottoman empire seem to be teetering on the edge of revolt. Even when faced with an actual Arab revolt, the Arab population of the empire did not rise up en masse against the Ottomans.

I am aware of precisely zero evidence that the empire "couldn't survive the war" in any sense other than the fact that they lost the war and the entente partitioned the empire out of existence and tried to impose treaty terms that ultimately emboldened Turkish nationalists like Ataturk to fight for a republican Turkish nation-state in place of an Ottoman Empire.

To your question, it's simply not the case that they "refused" to industrialize. There were extensive efforts to do so in the 19th century, less ambitious than those of Egypt, not especially successful in that there was no "industrial revolution" in the empire that could compete with, say, Britain or Germany, but it was not for a lack of trying.

Roger Owen's The Middle East in the World Economy: 1800-1914 explains this better than I could so I'll quote him at length:

To begin with industry, a number of Ottoman initiatives testify to the fact that some administrators (and perhaps the Sultan himself) were well aware of the dangers of becoming totally dependent on Europe for manufactured goods. An Industrial Reform (or Improvement) Commission was set up in the 1860s to investigate the existing state of particular industries as well as to make recommendations about how they might be improved. Trade fairs were organized at which Turkish goods were put on display. A school of industrial reform was opened in Istanbul in 1867." But the effect was minimal. In the meantime, the fact that in 1861-2 the Ottomans fmally obtained international consent to raise the external tariff to 8 per cent in exchange for the step-by-step reduction of duties on exports to 1 per cent did not provide a significant increase in the protection available to local industry; while such harmful practices as taxing the internal movement of locally produced goods by Ottoman merchants were not ended until 1874_76 A good example of the deleterious consequences of this latter policy concerns the many under-utilized flour mills of Istanbul which, according to a British report, could have been kept going at something like full capacity if only they had not had to pay a duty on the cereals they brought into the city and on the finished product when it was sent out again. Foreign flour, on the other hand, was only taxed once. 7J In these circumstances the only local industries that could hope to flourish were those that obtained some protection from European competition as a result of high transport costs or those able to benefit from the relatively lower cost of Anatolian agricultural produce. Manufacturing activity in the first category included the many weavers of silk, wool and linen who continued to exist in rural areas away from the many importing centres like those in the Diarbekir district which, according to a British commercial report of the early 1870s, clothed 'the greater part of the village, pastoral and town population' .7S The silk reeling factories of Bursa are perhaps the best example of the successful use of a local crop. Another is the manufacture of carpets in a number of west Anatolian towns, exports of which rose from an annual average of £94,000 (1871-4) to £170,000 (1875-9).79 However, in almost all cases such activity was either begun by foreign entrepreneurs or their local proteges, or, as in the case of the carpets, rapidly taken over by them.

But if the government was markedly unsuccessful in promoting new industry it also paid less and less attention to the possibilities of continuing to produce goods (and particularly military supplies) in its own factories. While a few plants, augmented by a system of regimental workshops, continued to man ufacture uniforms, boots and some small- arms, by mid -century the pace of European technological progress had made it increasingly difficult to contemplate the local production of hand guns, artillery or ships.sl In the case of the guns it would seem likely that the major turning-point came with the development of the rifled barrel in the 1840s, the manufacture of which required much greater technical precision than that of the earlier smoothbore cannons or muskets. In the case of the navy, the need to maintain parity with the steam-propelled iron-clads of its major European rivals meant that few if any of the corvettes and frigates brought into service after 1850 could be constructed in Turkish yards. 82

I could continue to include quotations and statistics he provides in relation to the state of Ottoman industry in the period leading up to WWI, but to the point that the article is trying to make I'm not sure I see the point. As I said, I don't see any relation between the question of Ottoman industrialization and the survival of the Ottoman empire. Arguably more industrial empires like Russia did not survive the war, and in fact collapsed into civil war in spectacular fashion.

As for other things I dislike about the article:

in terms of the Muslim world, this Middle East might stretch from Morocco to Afghanistan,

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan will be very sad to discover that it is not part of the Muslim world.

Overall, the population is concentrated in the mountains of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey.

The cities of Baghdad and Istanbul will be very surprised to find themselves located on mountains.

The Kurds are largely Sunni Muslims. They are hostile to Arab Sunnis and Shiites.

The Kurds are the hostile ones. Right.

But unlike Muslim and Christian conquerors, [the Ottomans] didn't pursue religious uniformity through forced conversion

Terrible phrasing and the "Islam spread by the sword" canard.

After World War I, the victorious powers divided the spoils under the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I've written about this a lot, but let's go with this post for how the Ottoman Empire was actually divided.

The Europeans believed in the European-style nation-state as devoutly as if it were a religion. They divided the region into five states: Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Transjordan, and Lebanon.

Lol, which is why they created five countries that are not nation-states.

The French took the northwest portion and consolidated it into one large state, Syria.

Actually they tried to subdivide Syria into four more "natural" ethno-religious substates and were met with a mass revolt that forced them to go back to one big Syria. But other than that, yeah.

lacking a name for it, named it after the major mountain there, Lebanon.

Ha. Haha. BAHAHAHAHHAHAHA. No. The French did not arbitrarily pick the name for Lebanon from a big mountain. "Mount Lebanon" refers the mountain range that dominates the territory and is thus the name for the territory itself, which is why the Ottomans called the area the same thing.

The British also promised the Jews a state on the other side of the Jordan

The Balfour Declaration is 67 words long. It does not include a promise of a Jewish state.

In fact, Sunni, Shiite, Arab, Kurdish, Persian, and Turkic dynasties have been competing in the Middle East since the 10th century.

Why the 10th? Were Samanids and the Hamdanids and the Tahirids and the Safarids not not competing in the 9th?

Saudi Arabia, the one Arab state that arose out of Western rule over the Middle East

What does this mean?

Jordan (as artificial a state as any)

Yes. Because all states are artificial. Nations are made up. States are not "natural."

And then followed by a bunch of 20-year-rule that I can't comment on but oh God make it stop...