The article is actually somehow worse than the headline. It looks at things on a scale of thousands of years, and the argument is essentially "war happened, the conditions of humanity improved, ergo war is good". Then it's just filler, mostly name dropping events and famous works, literally distracting you from the fact that it's a dog shit argument by going "oh you think my argument is dumb? Well I'm smart so how could that be?"
Piketty's "Capitalism in the 21st Century" does a great job of racking up the mind-blowing totality of loss incurred during the late colonial and world war eras. Literally centuries of accumulated infrastructure obliterated in a couple of wars that totaled less than a decade.
That's before you discuss the human toll. Not just all the young people that the various state leaders tossed into a cynically contrived, callously operated meat grinder. But the millions upon millions of civilians who were killed or maimed or starved or sickened to an early demise. Then consider the spike in illiteracy, the rapid spread of disease, the industrial scale pollution of arable land and potable water, the proliferation of arms and armor throughout the world...
Just a nightmarish display of waste and an explosion in human misery, and we have people writing Op-Eds about how we need to get back to that. Jesus fucking Christ.