Aye, there's the rub....

The "hub stands on its spokes" thing is a headline which he immediately qualifies. It's also kind of metaphorical, but his explanation is lacking, IMO.
A compression-spoke wheel does actually stand on its lower spoke. You could remove the rim, and the spoke itself would statically support the load. This of course would not happen in a tension-spoke wheel. But it functionally "stands on its spokes" or supports the load because of the stability of the entire tensioned structure.

This is an example of how sometimes I think his desire to debunk things got in the way of a clear explanation. A tension-spoke wheel doesn't "stand" on its lower spokes any more than it "hangs" from its upper spokes. But he got hung up (pun intended) on explaining it in a way that had to contradict the "hanging" explanation.
He was also trying to write a book for people without a ME degree, so the explanations had to be more metaphorical, I suppose. It can be easy to lose sight of the fact that metaphors are sort of definitionally not physical descriptions, too.