Pretty good, balanced article.
It should be noted that the benefits of empire have been enjoyed mainly by the groups you never hear about in history, the peasants who aren’t slaughtered by invaders. The losers in empire are often the local elites displaced by the imperialists. They lost their freedom. The peasants never had any.
With occasional possible exceptions, modern empire has not been a paying enterprise. All the taxes and products extracted from Africa did not pay the imperialists a fraction of the money they spent conquering and administering it. South Africa probably excepted.
Yet the modern world we take for granted exists largely because the USA fills the imperial role. And is roundly denounced for it.
I've often thought that the purpose of invading and controlling Africa has been to prevent it from organizing itself. It has been kept undermined and self-destructive by funding madness in careful patterns throughout the last 200+ years. What couldn't be controlled or stopped if it got big enough, has been turned against itself and made to self-destruct.