If you read the article and considered the argument it makes, you'd see that, in fact, it is not redundant at all. This is indeed the point of the article!
But it is redundant. I know how to do calculations in Newtonian mechanics, and I never use the first law, and nobody does. Nobody would miss a bit if Newton presented his theory as only 2 laws (his second and third), and skipped the first one. But philosophers will find ways to argue about some deep meaning and put out thousands of words about said deep meaning.