The speed standard is used to funnel money to the incumbents. The incumbents are supposed to improve and/or upgrade their speeds or coverage to match these standards in return for these subsidies, but reality has a way to get in the way. In practice the incumbents pocket the money and deliver whatever they feel like.
If this is true, then the meaning of the article is "FCC was going to spend tons of money to bribe ISPs into upgrading everybody to unrealistically high speeds, but instead they decided they would spend slightly less money to have ISPs to upgrade everybody to still unrealistically high speeds, but slightly lower, which wouldn't be happening in any case because there's no enough infrastructure to support it".
The speed standard is used to funnel money to the incumbents. The incumbents are supposed to improve and/or upgrade their speeds or coverage to match these standards in return for these subsidies, but reality has a way to get in the way. In practice the incumbents pocket the money and deliver whatever they feel like.