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Yup, that is an out-of-date article. Like any genre, the interest in SF waxes and wanes; that might have been written during one of SF's lulls. Though IIRC, the Borders that I went to during that time had a humongous SciFi/Fantasy section that was heavily SciFi.
I think, too, that the focus of SciFi periodically shifts. There's the emphasis on the whiz-bang new technology, then the emphasis shifts to how human- or alien-kind is dealing with the technological and social changes. Sort of like how we had the movies where the scientists and their tech could solve even the most horrendous alien monster attack, and then we get something like Star Trek which told us that maybe all alien monsters aren't really monsters (or that alien) after all.
I think that Sawyer either has forgotten or doesn't know that a lot of scifi writers have done their early work writing Star Trek novels - the same novels that include all those characters he is lamenting that have gone missing from the films. And though they were "...spending what are traditionally one's most productive years turning out work in the mold of other writers, instead of developing their own voices..." many of them went on to become successful scifi writers in their own right and developed their own voices.
I looked up Sawyer's DOB, which is 1960. By the time he was in high school, the "big three" of the scifi world had already become accepted as part of the literature curriculum in those grades. That would explain why most people are more familiar with their work than with current scifi authors.
Just thinking back to when I was a kid, my library didn't break out scifi as a separate category with its own shelves; those books were mixed in with the general fiction. I remember discovering Poul Anderson by accident.
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