It's between those views. It's not the way we've been doing things for the past 50 years because 50 years ago was 1971 where everything happened in the data center. But it is what we've done for a lot of the past two decades and a lot of the article's text is weird.
"Edge computing is a paradigm that sees complex computational tasks [...] performed as close to the “user” as possible."
Nothing wrong there. The most complex tasks have long been done at the data center. Searching a big database or things like that usually happened there. What are the things they're discussing?
"like data analysis or cloud gaming"
This though is a little funny. Data analysis can be done in a DC if it's intense enough, but it's not unusual to perform the analysis on a typical computer. Cloud gaming, while done on cloud machines now, is what happened after gaming on user's computers because the cloud couldn't handle things fast enough to return the frames to the user before they became obsolete. That is nothing new.
If we want something even funnier, check this:
"The 5G network spec has been touted as a major driver behind this, particularly in the spaces of industrial and agricultural IoT, thanks to its lower latencies when compared to previous generation mobile standards."
This is so far off the mark. 5G is faster, meaning there is less time (assuming you have 5G and it's working) to get your data from the collection point to the server. That means the latency problem of waiting for the cloud is lowered. 5G is actually reducing the likelihood of edge computing since it doesn't take as long to wait. Edge computing is useful when you don't want to wait, so you collect the data here and process it here too.
Since the 90s, we've had the ability to take a computer out to places where data was collected. Not only that, but through much of that time, the ability to send that data from the point of collection to a larger computer was a weak point. Mobile connections were not as widespread and much slower. So a lot of the use cases for that collection either waited a long time for slow uploads to a data center or processed the data locally. Only as networks improved did we start doing more of that on remote servers. Edge is not a new concept. It's a new name for "the computer is in the collector box".