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Or be Asimov, right?
There is an element of, 'isn't that obvious?' about this idea, but the truth is that there is no hard and fast rule. Some people will remain lively, productive and inspired into their 90s. Others will peak much earlier and decline. Some may peak, decline and then recover.
For example, the list of authors given is questionable in itself. Clarke is 'best-known' for the ODYSSEY books, but only because of the movies. His most critically-acclaimed novels are RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA and THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE, which come from later in his career (also CHILDHOOD'S END from much earlier). The author of the list also neglects to point out that the WHEEL OF TIME went off the boil for a long time (seven years, at least) but Jordan himself did drag the series kicking and screaming back into shape with his last published novel before he died. As for Moorcock, ELRIC is his best-known work but also (IMO) one of his weakest. Later works, such as MOTHER LONDON and the PYAT sequence, are vastly superior.
Tolkien is also a questionable one, as his late-life writings (mostly collected in UNFINISHED TALES) are in many ways far more interesting, introspective and sophisticated than LORD OF THE RINGS. He never wrote another novel and a lot of THE SILMARILLION was drawn from earlier-written drafts and ideas, but from the glimpses in UNFINISHED TALES (and the HISTORY series) he was very far from having peaked in 1954. Depending on POV, King's last few novels have also been a return to form (or at least his last couple of books have been 'event' books that have excited readers in a way we haven't seen for many years).
The author of the article also ignores any author whose continued production of superior work well into their eighties or nineties puts his argument in doubt. Jack Vance (97) is brought up in the comments (and handwaved away as the 'exception that proves the rule') but there's also Gene Wolfe (80 and counting) and Brian Aldiss (87 and counting) to consider.
Agatha Christie wrote continuously. Some people wrote only one book. Some of the D&D authors of the Day are in their 30's and creating great stuff now for Pathfinder (paperbacks) and others. Moorcock wrote the opposite of Elric as well, that future guy with the gun Hawkmoon.
Tolkien wrote a novel about a dog. It was a story for his son Christopher and it was published a few years back finally. Quite good.
Okay, nerd rage time: "the exception that proves the rule" does specifically and emphatically not mean that you can't have a rule be true if the rule isn't disproven by counterexamples. It means that if you have an unwritten rule, and then get an exception specified against it, the rule is real and exists. IIRC the phrase was coined by Cicero, regarding a discussion of roman citizenship.
[/nerd rage]
Part of it could also just be burn-out on the part of the author instead of any real sort of degradation of ability. Writing is hard work. The hours a writer puts into formulating an idea, doing the needed research, pre-writing, writing, re-writing, editing, and re-re-writing a novel is more time than a person would put in working at a normal job. I would surmise that a serious writer puts in more work hours in a decade than most people would in a 30+ year career. Add to that the stress of deadlines taunted by writer's block, snarky fans, overly dedicated fans/stalkers, critics, the fact that the writer may be doing well financially but far from true fame and fortune, and the politics of publishing and it's no wonder that a writer has a small window of when they do their best work. After a decade in the writing biz, if most writers did to do to their word processors what they really wanted to do, it would be classified as a hate crime.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned John Kennedy Toole.