You and I both win provided neither of us tries to actually make the batteries. Instead, we wait for someone who does and sue them. If we try to make them, we discover that while you patented something about 40 hours and I patented something about chemistry, neither of us patented something about manufacturing them and a third troll sues us.
The point of the article is that the only losers are the ones who try to do anything tangible that requires a collection of patented ideas to function.
This implies that you can, sitting at a table with a pint, come up with the key patentable ideas for the 40 hour batteries. The odds rather favor the people building batteries in earnest, don't they?
No, because this is not a case of A vs. B. It's A vs. all the Bs, Cs, Ds, &c patenting stuff.
So sure, a company building a battery has a good chance of coming up with an enforceable patent. But given thousands of people trying to patent battery-ish ideas and many that aren't immediately related to batteries, the odds favour one of them coming up with something that receives a patent and is vaguely related to whatever the battery manufacturer is doing.
Remember, a patent is a sword but not a shield. Just because you patent an idea and make something with that idea, you cannot assume that nobody else has a patent that applies to your "patented" idea. They may have patented some other part of the process for manufacturing your "invention" or they may have a patent for an underlying component of your process even though you have patented a novel way to apply their patented idea.
Please let go of the idea that patenting something is a license to actually do something tangible with your idea. It is not: It is actually a license to interfere with other people doing something with your idea.
In the modern patent business, the "odds" favor the first party to encounter a particular problem in their field of art. If you're lucky enough to encounter a problem first, you can patent the first obvious solution(s) that come to mind, and effectively own the field later.
This is why nonobviousness was supposed to be a criterion for granting patents, and why we're all worse off now that the USPTO has effectively abandoned it.
The point of the article is that the only losers are the ones who try to do anything tangible that requires a collection of patented ideas to function.