Before I get to the quoted passage, it is fair to say that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (hereafter: SEP) is the most valuable philosophical resource on the internet today and that within it the entries on logic and its history take pride of place. This state of affairs is a consequence of certain path dependencies that need not concern us here, and it is not intended to cast aspersion on it or other philosophical projects online (or groups of entries in the SEP).
I know Cook as the author of a highly entertaining and instructive essay on Logical Pluralism (in Philosophy Compass). In the passage quoted above, Cook kind of treats Frege as a foreign country (hereafter: Fregeland) which requires total immersion in order to acquire expertise about it. (I didn't use 'language' in the previous sentence in order to avoid confusion about what the language one must learn really is.) This immersive stance goes against the idea that one can acquire the right sort of knowledge of Fregeland via a (Quine-ean) translation manual.
The immersive stance also presupposes a kind of soft incommensurability between modern logics and the ones one might find in (or of) Fregeland. (Perhaps this is his own pluralism speaking.) I use 'soft' because Cook clearly rejects the idea one can do a strict piecemeal comparisons between Fregeland and more recent logcs when one lacks the sensibility and skill acquired after immersion. His entry reveals that after immersion one can certainly do so in fruitful ways (sometimes aided by the expressive strengths of modern logics and sometimes by those found in Fregeland).
There are fascinating pay-offs to Cook's approach, the most notable for me (but only after a first reading) is that (see, for example, the treatment of Basic Law III) Cook is willing to make claims about what gaps in Fregeland might reveal about, say, Frege's awareness of the incompleteness of his own logic as opposed to an awareness of a more anachronistic in principle incompleteness of second-order logic. (In context, Cook is disagreeing with Dummett.)
There are prominent historians of philosophy, who think of themselves as contextualists and as rejecting anachronism (interestingly, in context Cook quotes Dummett, who I tend to think of as a Whig historian of philosophy, who, in the quoted paragraph explicitly relies on a rejection of anachronism). These contextualist historians of philosophy also embrace, often without full self-awareness, a kind of positivism about past texts and only allow explicit statements as evidence into their analysis or historical treatment. And so such historians of philosophy cannot allow lacunae and silences to be significant to those they study in the past. This has the unfortunate side-effect that in some respects philosophers of the past and the past as such are thereby dumbed down.
As an aside, since some of you know of my fascination with the role of esoteric writing in the past, I wish to add that the silences I speak of in the previous paragraph may be of a different kind. Silences can also be indicative of shared background commitments or the common ground in a language game that do not need to be made explicit to thinkers in a particular age. And sometimes they are indicative of an aesthetic or formal sensibility where explicitness on a certain Y ruins the clarity X being aimed at in Z.
Be that as it may, and returning to Cook, and to what I take to be the most striking effect of his methodological stance: once one is immersed in Fregeland, one may well discern advantages to Frege's approach even when compared to modern deductive systems (see what Cook has to say about Frege's treatment of the rules of inference at the start of Cook's section 3.4). To make this plausible is quite an achievement on Cook's part because after more than a century of progress along multiple dimensions, it is very hard to have a sense of the possible costs or limitations of such progress. This is especially so because in our education we are drilled in the modern approaches, and we don't tend to teach the route we got here. To make such costs or paths not taken visible to the reader is, in fact, one of the higher purposes of the historian of philosophy today. I don't mean to suggest this is Cook's own stance; he clearly implies that he sees his main task as disclosing the past to us, that is, to be a guide in our journey of discovery.
Obviously I am not endorsing Cook's analysis of Fregeland--this endorsement would be worthless anyway because while I claim some expertise in early analytic philosophy, I am no expert on the very contested terrain of Frege (and a below average logician given the disciplinary baseline). You read his entry and make up your own mind (although I suspect that once immersed you may find yourself with different questions). But I do think it's fair to say -- and I do claim some standing here -- that at the moment SEP is also at the forefront of the historiography of philosophy not the least in its (very diverse) entries on Frege. And given the significance of Frege to the self-conception of analytic philosophy as a tradition -- and as I note to outsiders analytic philosophers do not usually think about the nature of tradition or working in it, but do have a strong self-conception in which Frege does figure to some degree -- that in itself is worthy of some commentary.
One final thought. In a series of provocative posts (many of which have prompted digressions by me), Liam Kofi Bright has strongly suggested (recall here); but earlier here and here) that our age is in the midst of shift in philosophical sensibility (akin to a Kuhnian paradigmatic crisis). One need not accept Hegel or Kuhn's historiography to agree that the high quality of historical writing about Fregeland is also an indicator that such a shift is, indeed, taking place, even intensifying.
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