Especially this paragraph is very incorrect:

"The ancients were hydrogen sulfide metabolisers. H2S could be readily chowed down as an energy source — it fell apart within the cell at ordinary temperature, its hydrogens surrendered as easy fuel. But oxygen was harder to crack: it was locked in a molecular safe, water’s O–H bound 100 kJ/mol more strongly than S–H down a period. H2O required photon-driven electrical impulses and quantum trickery to unpick its bonds."

As it is written, this paragraph implies that H2S could be used without solar energy, while H2O requires solar energy. This is false, because most ways in which H2S can be used to reduce carbon dioxide into organic matter result in a negative energy balance, the same as when using water, so they require an additional source of energy, which is provided by capturing solar energy.

The true history has much more steps until the appearance of the blue-green algae that can produce free oxygen from water.

All autotrophic living beings require 3 resources in order to be able to make organic substances from carbon dioxide: energy, hydrogen and something that can be oxidized while the carbon from carbon dioxide is reduced. Being oxidized means losing electrons, which are transferred to that which is reduced, so "something that can be oxidized" is also known as an "electron donor".

For the first living beings that have ever existed, free hydrogen provided all 3 resources required for an autotrophic life: it provides hydrogen, it is an electron donor and the reaction of hydrogen with CO2 that results in acetic acid provides energy. Much later, some of the living beings, the so-called methanogens, have developed an alternative chemical reaction between H2 and CO2, which makes methane instead of acetic acid and which provides more energy than the reaction that makes acetic acid. Most humans have in their guts both acetogens and methanogens, which continue to have an autotrophic life style that does not require solar energy, in the same way as billions of years ago.

However, the requirement for free hydrogen caused a severe constraint on the places where the first living beings could live, as there were not many such places. For the colonization of the entire Earth surface it has been necessary to become able to also exploit other resources instead of free hydrogen.

Most other sources of hydrogen and of electron donors do not provide energy when reacting with CO2, so in order to use them an additional source of energy is needed.

That additional source of energy has been solar energy, which has been initially captured by using ion pumps that are powered by solar energy, which store the captured energy in ion gradients. These work pretty much similarly with solar cells, but instead of transporting electrons using the solar energy they transport either hydrogen ions or sodium ions.

Having a separate source of energy has simplified the problem of finding resources for reducing CO2 to satisfying only 2 requirements: providing hydrogen and providing an electron donor.

These 2 requirements are satisfied by H2S, so after becoming capable of using H2S, the phototrophic bacteria have become the most abundant living beings. Even today, after the oxygen-producing living beings the most abundant autotrophic living beings are the green sulfur bacteria and the purple sulfur bacteria, which use H2S instead of water.

So the autotrophic bacteria that could use H2S already needed solar light. The path from splitting H2S to splitting water was not direct, there have been other intermediate steps. When using H2S, it provides hydrogen and sulfur is the electron donor. Then some phototrophic bacteria have developed means to use other electron donors instead of sulfur.

The Fe(II) and Mn(II) iron and manganese ions are soluble in water, while the more oxidized ions Fe(III) and Mn(IV) are insoluble in water. Today, because of the oxygen in air, most iron and manganese are more oxidized, so the sea water has very little iron and manganese. Before the existence of free oxygen, most iron and manganese were less oxidized, so the sea water was rich in iron and manganese.

Because they were abundant in water, some phototrophic bacteria have developed means to use either Fe(II) or Mn(II) as the electron donors, instead of using the sulfur from H2S. In this case the source of hydrogen for making organic substances was the water, but this did not result in free oxygen, because the oxygen from water became bound to the more oxidized iron or manganese ions, instead of becoming free oxygen.

Iron is very difficult to oxidize more than at the Fe(III) level from rust, but manganese can be oxidized at levels higher than Mn(IV) (the level from black pyrolusite), even to levels as high as the Mn(VII) from permanganate, without great difficulties.

Thus some of the phototrophic bacteria that used manganese as the electron donor became capable to oxidize manganese to levels higher than Mn(IV) and these very oxidized manganese ions were able in turn to oxidize the oxygen from water into free oxygen, which was released into the environment.

These are the steps through which the autotrophic bacteria have evolved from the original use of free hydrogen to the use of solar energy coupled with the use of hydrogen from water and with the use of oxygen from water as an electron donor, which results in the release of free oxygen into the atmosphere.

An interesting fact is that the development of the ability of using water for providing both hydrogen and an electron donor, which enabled the living beings to colonize the entire surface of the Earth, regardless of the availability of sulfur, iron or manganese, has not happened in the oceans, presumably because in the oceans there was no need for this, as in the oceans there were sufficient amounts of sulfur, iron or manganese.

Instead of in the oceans, the ability to use water and release free oxygen appeared somewhere on the borders of the continents, and once it was available the ancestors of the blue-green algae have colonized the fresh water on the continents, an environment that was previously lifeless. Only much later the blue-green algae have colonized again the oceans. Actually it is likely that the oceanic blue-green algae have appeared much more recently than the invasion of the oceans by red algae, followed by the invasion of the oceans by green algae, which both happened more than a billion years ago.

The common ancestor of red algae and of green algae has also appeared not in the oceans, but it has appeared somewhere on the borders of continents, through the symbiosis between a blue-green alga and an eukaryotic organism. Later the descendants of this hybrid have split into the ancestors of red algae and of green algae, which have then colonized the oceans separately.