So Kristen Beyer says it’s canon, but she isn’t in charge of making that decision. Only CBS/Paramount is. And to my knowledge, they have not said it’s canon.
You missed the part where Kirsten explicitly said "There is nobody who comes along and... waves a scepter and dubs a thing ‘canon.’" Canon is not an official studio-assigned label of any kind -- that's a myth. It's just a descriptive nickname we use to talk about fictional series. Whatever the writers of the original work create is what we refer to with the word "canon." It's those writers who decide which stories they want to acknowledge or ignore. The studio couldn't care less about in-story continuity as long as they make money, which is why there are so many series out there that have been rebooted by their owners or have had mutually contradictory installments (like quite a few long-running horror movie series, or the
Highlander franchise).
So yes, as one of the writer-producers of the
Star Trek franchise, Kirsten absolutely
is one of the people in charge of making that decision --
currently. Of course, as the article says, that only applies to the position of the people currently making the shows. It won't necessarily be binding on future creators, though. When Jeri Taylor was the showrunner of
Voyager, she treated her novels
Mosaic and
Pathways as canonical and incorporated elements from "Mosaic" into one or two episodes. The canonicity of those novels was trumpeted by StarTrek.com and other references at the time. But as soon as Taylor left the show, her successors started ignoring and contradicting character backstory details established in
Pathways. Because canon is not some binding official policy, it's just a nickname for what the storytellers create, and the storytellers are the ones who decide the content of the stories they tell. What one showrunner considers canonical can be ignored by another. (Or vice-versa. Brannon Braga was so embarrassed by VGR: "Threshold" that he declared it non-canonical, but
Lower Decks reestablished it as part of canon.)
Anyway, I still think it's likely to be a moot point, since it seems unlikely to me that any future project would have reason to reference anything from
Khan. I mean,
Strange New Worlds takes place before it, and
Starfleet Academy is nearly a millennium after it. So it may never be either acknowledged or contradicted.
EDIT: Although it occurs to me that it could be significant in setting a precedent for future audio productions to be considered canonical, and those stories, if they happen (and I hope they do), might be more likely to have relevance to onscreen events. Although of course, I doubt any onscreen story would ever
depend on information from an audio story, since the audience for those is bound to be much smaller. (Which means it's likely to be the kind of "beta canon" that can be freely ignored by primary canon, like the supposedly canonical
Star Wars novels and comics that got contradicted by new screen content in both the old Expanded Universe and the current continuity. But of course, primary canon can ignore its own past too, and frequently does, which is why canon is basically meaningless anyway.)
