[scoot]

Did I misunderstand, or was that not the entire thrust of the article?

That vector tiles enable the representation of a subset of the data that a particular group care about (e.g. playgrounds) in order to encourage and enable contribution from a wider and more diverse community?

[lakechfoma]

Seems to me like that's more of a new defining feature of OSM, which may incidentally attract more contributors, but that in and of itself is not lowering the barrier to entry for prospective contributors.