This article is full of guesswork and supposition unsupported by evidence. I don't understand why people upvoted it.
Further, the author doesn't seem to understand that "the state", with its institutions, legal systems, etc as we understand it simply did not exist in Europe during medieval times. Or even during the Roman empire era. For example, he writes "taxes were voluntary". It's just laughable. Moreover, during that era, "tax" was synonymous with "rent". It's where the term "landlord" comes from, after all. Even concepts of ownership were somewhat different from today.
Was society decentralized during the so-called "dark ages" of europe? Sure. But it was also decentralized during the Roman era and pretty much all eras before high speed communications. It sorta had to be for society to work.
It does read like a teenage anarchist (edit: sorry, anarcho-capitalist, which is worse by far) just discovered that medieval Europe was decentralized and spun a wild fanatasy about how that was actually anarchist around it, yes.
>Was society decentralized during the so-called "dark ages" of europe? Sure. But it was also decentralized during the Roman era and pretty much all eras before high speed communications. It sorta had to be for society to work.
In a way you are not wrong, state capacity has been far higher for quite a while now than the Romans or ancient Chinese could ever hope to reach, but in a way that detracts from how much more decentrantralized Europe during the Middle Ages was. The collapse of urbanisation and bureaucracy, and the rise of fortified manors meant that power really fractured.