I dunno. People do this exact thing by hand (digest everything they've read and produce something indirectly derivative--what author has not been so-influenced?) and it's not a copyright violation. It's just as impossible to dig around in a model to find Hamlet as it is to do digging around a human brain. And if the result is an obvious copy, then you have a violation no matter how it was created.
As someone who thinks humanity would be better off without LLMs, I want the assertion to be true, but I don't think it is.
The author acknowledges this by saying “at a bigger scale”, implying there are smaller scale methods such as what you have said.