The standard is excellent, and has been rolled out much more effectively than previous standards (much more smoothly than flexbox, to cite a recent example).
The women involved in this project kicked ass, and continue to do so. What's to feel conflicted about?
It's also releveant that the author feels perfectly justified in making recourse to a hypothesis about history which far from easy to test: “The idea of genius elaborated during the Romantic Age (late 18th and 19th centuries) has done harm to education.”
Compared to what? Clearly he doesn’t know how to make a historical argument — perhaps he considers such arguments beneath him.
It's not just dead people you're talking about, it's the families of those people. Keep in mind that in many cases the recordings of their ancestors are the only ones existing. It's not at all clear that a university or library should always be able to make those decisions without the involvement of the families.
There is often very private, very personal information in language documentation: even though it seems like the fact that the speaker should have been aware that making a recording was equivalent in some way to publication.
Plus, it's important to remember that before modern standards of informed consent were created, many linguists didn't have the speakers' best interests at heart, and were unscrupulous about recordings.
The ethics of legacy field recordings is a very messy business, with consequences ranging from legal measures to the unceremonious end of otherwise productive relationships between speech communities and researchers. I've seen cases where individual children of a single speaker have had differing opinions on what should happen to recordings.
There are whole subfields of language documentation, language revitalization, language reclamation, etc. There are conferences (ICLDC, Breath of Life, Language is Life just to mention three), journals (http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/), funding organizations, archives, PhD programs around the world…
Could mean almost anything but what generativist linguistics (or whatever the latest label for the Chomskyan school) does, which continues to promote the notion that language is essentially algebraic, that "grammaticality" is binary, and so forth. It's simply not the case that Chomsky is "okay" with approaches to the study of language which are not in accord wiht his own. He repeatedly dismisses whole subdisciplines as "uninteresting," but in context those complaints don't mean "uninteresting to me," they mean "worthless."