Plot of distribution of all bitcoin transaction fees paid?
So this gives very useful info, but if I want to see the distribution of all historical transaction fees on the blockchain, how could I do that?

The information doesn't look useful. Distribution of fee rates used by unconfirmed transactions can be checked on many websites like https://mempool.space/ https://mempool.observer/ https://btc.bitaps.com/

Fees per transaction (BTC) in last few years:

https://bitcoinvisuals.com/chain-fees-tx-btc
There is one open PR to add mempool stats chart in Bitcoin Core GUI as well:
https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gui/pull/108
If you want to get fee rate and fee used in all the bitcoin transactions until now, API for any block explorer can be used. There are also few open source explorers like Esplora, NBXplorer, mempool etc.

Also, because the value of bitcoin has changed a great deal over the past several years, it would be sensible to measure the transaction fees in USD equivalent (like the article does)

Depends on the usecase. Bitcoin protocol is not aware of exchange rate for BTC. I would prefer to use sat/vByte for fee rate and BTC for fees.