If anything, I'd say that it's a class thing. Children from an upper class "pedigree" ("old money" especially) are often expected to study medicine, law or business[0]. This has little to do with intrinsic "talent" other than these children's parents often being able to afford private tutoring to make up for any academic shortcomings. In fact, politicians (even ones from aristrocratic backgrounds) have repeatedly been involved in scandals over academic fraud like hiring ghost writers to write their thesis in order to get a degree to make them appear more respectable[1].

Talented students still can be and are pursuing STEM degrees but a lot of research these days often doesn't entirely happen directly in the universities themselves but in organizations like the Fraunhofer institutes (also Max-Planck, Helmholtz, Leibniz and DFG), which neatly toe the line between being a quasi public institution and being a for-profit commercial entity.

Ironically, a huge shift in German universities happening around the time of the EU replacing local degrees like the German "Magister Artium" with more "standardized" ones like BA/MA was an attempt to push the concept of "elite universities" via special funding programmes supporting university faculties that were already prospering to replicate the exact US model (while also introducing tuition fees for public universities, before having to roll them back due to public outrage).

Also on a complete tangent, the graph the article uses clearly shows a sharp decline during the Nazi regime followed by Germany plateuing until the 1990s or so and then having another smaller decline until flatlining again.

The article blames the sharp decline in the 1930s and 1940s on "explicit talk of nurturing an elite" being a problem in the Nazi era, which is a ridiculous conflation of modern and past anti-semitism (the Nazis' scapegoat was "international bankers", not "the elites") but also completely misunderstands Nazi ideology, which heavily embraced elitism and "excellence" but was kneecapped by its obsession with avoiding "Jewish" or "degenerate" science. This honestly reads like it's written by someone whose only understanding of Nazism comes from some ahistorical "actually the Nazis were left-wing because they had 'socialist' in their name and used leftist talking points to gain broader support" memes.

The other drop in the 1990s is also interesting. The author claims Germany's "problems" are the result of a democratization of universities and egalitarianism but the obvious thing that changed in the 1990s is that "Germany" expanded to include what was previously East Germany, which regardless of any merits of Eastern Bloc academia in the previous decades at this point was economically destitute and underwent a rapid privatization followed by massive "brain drain" as those who could afford to moved westward.

[0]: This is also where you're more likely to find "fraternities" which are a much more niche phenomenon and more specifically tied to conservatism than in the US. "Burschenschaften" typically have strict gender roles and historically were more strongly tied to German aristocracy. Though some practices (like fencing duels which would often result in facial scars carried with pride) have fallen out of use, they still often value "tradition" to the point of embracing "völkisch" nationalism, which has a large overlap with white nationalism in the US.

[1]: This is less true with younger generations but traditionally Germans would put a lot of stock into both aristrocratic honorifics and academic titles. Academic titles are still protected by law in Germany (i.e. it's a felony to use the title "Dr." or "Doktor" unless you have a doctorate from an institution Germany recognizes) though and people will still treat aristocratic names as if they were titles although aristocratic titles were officially rolled into family names. To explain this for English-speaking readers: imagine you were a "Lord" and your name was "Adam Smith", then your name would have become "Adam Lord Smith" and you would be correctly addressed as "Mr Lord Smith" but some people would still call you "Lord Smith" out of respect -- German laws are actually considerate enough to allow women to use the female equivalent of the title in their family name despite it officially just being part of the name so the daughter of Mr Lord Smith could still be Ms Lady Smith.