That Langewiesche piece is weird. I met the author many years ago, and I'm familiar with his work since then - but this is unusually like polemic.
In its functioning, the electric trim is smooth, powerful and usually well behaved. On occasion, however, it may start running on its own volition and prompt the airplane to nose up or down. That’s a runaway trim. Such failures are easily countered by the pilot — first by using the control column to give opposing elevator, then by flipping a couple of switches to shut off the electrics before reverting to a perfectly capable parallel system of manual trim. But it seemed that for some reason, the Lion Air crew might not have resorted to the simple solution.
As has been discussed frequently in this thread, that "some reason" was that AoA-failure-induced MCAS action doesn't look like runaway trim, because it responds to cancellation with the yoke switches. Therefore the impression is that the trim is controllable, and that the "simple solution" - leaving the pilots coping with heavy hand-trim loads, because in that regard the system is not "perfectly capable" - doesn't have to be invoked. But pilots are trained to use trim sparingly, and are understandably reluctant to pile on ANU trim with the stall-warning going, and are not aware that MCAS is going to apply AND trim at a perilous rate. Which in turn tends to increase speed and push the nose down, even while the same root cause is blatting out stall warnings.
The writer manages to avoid the obvious points: that once an erroneous MCAS action kicked in, the crew had become test pilots; and there's no control case where a skilled Western crew safely dealt with the problem.
On the other hand, the TNR story isn't that good either, particularly in its attempt to depict GE-trained leaders as the villains of the piece. Boeing's "problem-solving" culture had brought it to the brink of catastrophe before the McDonnell Douglas people arrived, by failing to deal with a dysfunctional production system, and it was classic Boeing people - Mulally and Condit - who turned the new-product-development process into an alternating sequence of moonshots (777, 787) and derivatives. Muilenburg, another veteran engineer-manager, has enthusiastically pushed the gospel of shareholder value.