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Notes -
Sam Harris absolutely has explicitly said that some societies are better than others and the West - i.e. the secular liberal democracies spawned by Western Europeans and their adopted East Asian allies - is the best. This is one of his main arguments against leftists academics: moral relativism and the refusal to accept this. He is 100% on the "swore allegiance to 'the West'"
Sam Harris went around claiming that it was highly plausible that France would have a civil war that'd kill millions over Islam. This was more than a decade ago mind. To a lot of people at the time (including me) it seemed at best to be hysteria or even outright race war fantasizing you see amongst neo-nazis who are eagerly waiting for the day of days. Simply suggesting it was disqualifying.
But he felt it strongly and stuck to it, including citing Eurabia about the upcoming Muslim majority (which, btw, defeats your "he was too stupid to clearly perceive the demographic danger". Putting aside whether Eurabia is accurate, he thought he perceived the danger).
Taken with his general views on Islam - which the article accurately lays out* - it absolutely is a problem I don't think he's ever resolved conclusively. I was all over New Atheist forums: this is a point the left-wing enemies of Harris constantly made: his argument strongly suggests ethnic cleansing or at least anti-Islamic immigration despite his steadfast refusal to connect those dots.
And Sam reliably came out to tell us that all of the right-wing European leaders saying as much may or may not be bad, but the problem is that "grown-up"' European leaders really should just do their anti-Islam work for them and defuse them because if liberals don't do it voters will elect fascists to do it. One of the right-wingers he's feted is Douglas Murray, who has explicitly backed removing as many Muslims as one can (though he seems to have basically become blackpilled now)
Yet Sam decided to insist that Trump's behavior was just totally incongruent with anything he said when he won (but also see the David Brooks quote about fascists and borders). I'm sorry, but people are right to point out the issue (he isn't the only one to have this problem - the author of this book somehow always puts on his Tucker Carlson face when European right-wingers take him at his word and attack Muslims).
I mainly put it down to just how fundamentally disgusted Sam was by Trump and the dangers of even pretending to side with him on anything. The people Sam respects and hangs around with would likely defenestrate him. Harris is, as a matter of demographics, the exact sort to loathe Trump despite his disagreements with leftists. In terms of character you could hardly think of someone more offensive to Harris on a visceral level, if you know anything about him or what he's written. Just take his book Lying....
If we're being charitable, he learned something from Bush where he seemed to have sympathetic instincts when it came to the War on Terror but it only seemed to make things worse, and Bush was actually restrained in many ways (Harris' most-loathed phrase about Islam was popularized by Bush).
* The article is arguably generous in that it attributes the problem to modern Islam. Harris has often put on his amateur historian and exegete hat to say Islam is in its fundamentals problematic and what are typically cited as its successes - precisely to defuse people like him - like the supposed tolerance in medieval Andalusia are mirages or at least oversold.
Even when he was writing a book about reforming Islam with Maajid Nawaz, he couldn't help but continually point out the whole endeavor basically involved lying and was incredibly difficult for Islam specifically.
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