This is accurate. As much fun as it is to revel in the Lakers dysfunction there is nothing here that strikes as being particularly out of the ordinary and a lot of the stuff that reads bad would be spun as a positive if the team was actually winning.
Rich Paul was pulling the same stunts in both Miami and Cleveland in terms of riding on the plane and pushing to get his guys in to prominent positions. Star players get perks. It sounds bad to hear hear about him existing his influence to get guys fired or traded, but was he wrong? Walton was the wrong coach for the team and most of the non-Lebron players stunk.
The article specifically contested the bolded, saying that nobody in those organizations recalls any such thing. No doubt he was doing the latter - that's his job, after all - but it seems like the Lakers were unique in the degree to which they let the fox into the hen house.
As for Walton, I'm not sure how you can draw that conclusion. Who would have been the right coach for the team? Red Auerbach would have quit in disgust, citing a litany of stupid management decisions and interference that had prevented him from doing his job. Maybe Walton felt he didn't have a credible threat to make in terms of "leave me alone or I'm quitting", so he might as well take more coaching reps this year. In any case, it clearly didn't hurt the market for his services, as a young exciting up-and-coming team signed him
one day after he departed the Lakers' employ.
I don't think micromanagement or a culture that discourages voicing contrary opinions are things that would be spun as a positive if the team were winning. I mean, doesn't the nature of Magic's resignation - if it can be called that - kind of shift the whole burden of proof? How can we regard someone as the barest level of "professional" when they do that? How can we give them the benefit of the doubt that "it'd be all good if they were winning"?
Lebron's ability to gather organizational power to himself and his advisors has been consistent at every place he's been, whether winning (MIA, CLE v2.0) or losing (CLE v1.0, here). I think a certain amount of meddling of Rich Paul is to be expected, and if he's trying to get the coach fired, then it's on the organization to back up their coach publicly and privately, and keep any doubts they have strictly among themselves. It's on them to give Walton the confidence that he can tell Paul to pound sand on certain things (I'm sure Adam Silver's reaction to Paul during his Maverick Carter lunch was probably idle statements of "oh, that's interesting"). Lebron arrived in Miami to play for a coach who was similarly unproven as Walton, and Pat Riley by all reports backed Spoelstra up, and it all worked out. The fact that there was constant micromanagement of Walton is not an indictment of his skills as a coach.