We studied the Gaia hypothesis in college, and, mirroring the article, it really is a "it is what you make of it" type of hypothesis. A room of ~20 people had 6-8 different ideas about the meaning and outcome of the hypothesis.
The Gaia hypothesis always seemed to me like Dawkins' "God's utility function", but without the same effect of calling out its own ridiculousness as an idea.
There's an optimal scale to look at something from, and for most applications, regarding Earth, this isn't it.
Wikipedia: "The Gaia hypothesis... proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet." [my emphasis.]
this rosy view has to contend with the fact that once (the great oxygenation event), and possibly twice (the cryogenian), life on Earth was making the environment inhospitable for itself, and at least in the first case, had to evolve to avoid a problem it had created for itself.
That's an excellent framing of why this idea has limited utility, outside e.g. propaganda.
Arguably this is one of the implicit arguments going on in between factions in Kim Stanley Robinson's _The Ministry for the Future_: in it, one faction wants to exploit the way faith and the religious mindset are powerful (perhaps the only proven) mechanism for constraining social behaviors, by making a Gaia-religion. Another is uncomfortable with this idea, e.g. because it's cynical and exploitative.
Whatever keeps us moving up the Kardashev scale...
