This article was hot garbage in other aspects, so I don’t trust their paraphrasing on this issue. (Do you happen to have a link to a primary source?). Qualcomm have been getting a far higher fees than the competitors with portfolios of similar quality:
It’s a long-standing pattern across the industry, not something that only happened with Apple a couple of years ago. So unless all of these companies were striking deals at artificially low prices with the intention of suing Qualcomm, I just don’t see anything nefarious there.
(Note: If every patent holder was charging fees at the level that Qualcomm asks for, the fees would account for a third of phone’s cost.)