I like things about that suggested TKL, but for starters ... the backspace & space have been reversed.
Sure, put space on whichever thumb you currently use for for the spacebar.
As for the rest, I was trying to change as little as possible relative to current standard keyboards, while still making a large improvement. Thus I was mostly attacking the low hanging fruit: on a standard TKL (like Model M SSK) layout, the worst key positions are escape, backspace, control, right shift, backslash. So I tried to move all of those, as well as making the board better centered on the table, and bringing the arrows and nav keys in closer.
Thumb ctrl keys are way better than ctrl in the outside corners, but if you prefer to put tab or whatever on those thumb keys, and use a pinky for ctrl, that’s also just fine, I'm sure. Or you could use those thumb keys for shift, and put ctrl where the shift keys are in my diagram.
(Or you could use just one thumb key for ctrl, and use the other one for some kind of fn layer, etc. etc.)