It sounds as though the author has not actually asked vision-impaired users.

And of course audio is not only for vision-impaired users.

I can play audio directly from a webpage at 5-10x speed easily, but I use the command line programs like ffmpeg/mplayer/mpv/vlc, not a browser like Chrome.

Assuming a Google employee's belief reflects what all web users actually prefer (doubtful!), websites could offer a variety of audio with the same TTS voices that screen readers use.