Not much really. He churns out a lot of articles, some of them can be a bit clickbaity, and lacking in much information. He does sometimes post articles that are purely based on rumours. But I think he fills a good niche for technical but easy to read Linux/open source news.
In this case he hasn't really done much more than summarise the official release notes, so OP may as well have linked to those.
In pretty much every case. It's rare that Michael actually contributes meaningfully to an article he posts. It's almost always just some copy/paste of the original source.
I don't know about phoronix especially, but the HN guidelines states "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." Maybe that is what he/she was referring to
In this case he hasn't really done much more than summarise the official release notes, so OP may as well have linked to those.