Even accounting for journalistic hyperbole and popularisation of historical themes for the sake of contemporary political advocacy, this article's claim that 'NIMBYs' (by which the article means 'pre-modern' or 'feudal' property systems with overlapping or conflicting claims to land) had held back modern economic growth; and its further claim that the British Industrial Revolution was unleashed by the modernisation of those property systems — these claims are really excessive!

The article revives what Allen called 'agrarian fundamentalism', the curious alliance of Marxists and ‘Tories’ in arguing that agriculture is/was the crucial bottleneck to the Industrial Revolution. Implicitly, therefore, the British Agricultural Revolution, as it actually transpired with the actual yields achieved in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, was necessary for the Industrial Revolution to happen.

Substitute 'any land use' for 'agriculture' and you get this article.

But it makes much more sense to think of the post-Glorious Revolution reforms, such as the Enclosure Acts, Estate Acts, and the Turnpike Acts, as moving England closer to its production possibilities frontier, even as the PPF was rapidly shifting outward thanks to technological change happening for reasons unrelated to these land-use-related reforms!

Even the article observes that German agriculture remained largely unreformed until after the second world war, but obviously industrialisation was not prevented. Both Japan and Germany had low-productivity agriculture that employed too many people compared with the UK both in 1914 and in 1939, but productivity was high enough to support industrialisation.

We now know that with the application of capital and technology, even unreformed agriculture could boost yields and support industrialisation. Consolidated, fully private land is more efficient but other, less efficient land arrangements did not prevent an industrial take-off. So why should we take an agrarian-fundamentalist view of the British Industrial Revolution?

The article also makes one massive factual mistake:

"In early 1900s Russia, Pyotr Stolypin’s land reforms used supermajority petitions by peasant farmers to divide their landholdings, boosting productivity so much that the country became the world’s top grain exporter”.

Russia surpassed the USA as the world's largest exporter of wheat (and barley, rye & oats) circa 1903, which was 4 years before Stolypin's reforms went into effect. So obviously Stolypin could have had nothing to do with it. Russia did it primarily through building railways and the use of the extensive margin (lots of land) despite comparatively low yields.

Stolypin's reforms definitely improved the productivity of the land, but their implementation was quite limited. As of 1915, approximately 16% of Russian peasant households had privatised their plots (removed them from the commune system) and about 10% of them had managed to consolidate the plots. That's according to Dower & Markevich.

This claim is more misleading than incorrect:

"The Punjab is the breadbasket of both India and Pakistan in part because both sides consolidated their fields into rational squares, unlike the rest of the subcontinent."

Punjab became the breadbasket of India in the late colonial period when the British Raj undertook a massive investment in canals and irrigation. And this and the railways made it so.

Punjab and Haryana (parts of the original Punjab now in India) did pass a land consolidation law in 1948. But this didn't have much impact until after the Green Revolution. You could say that land consolidation was the enabling factor behind the full exploitation of the GR, but it's tenuous to argue that. Because of its colonial history, Punjab has many other advantages in agriculture (canals, irrigation, electrification, credit markets, agricultural extension systems) besides consolidated farms. Tamil Nadu (a state with no land consolidation) has almost as much uptake of high-yield varieties, but much less agricultural growth than Punjab.