Brexit "win" not really much of a win

I was a bit confused about this - did the Parliament's passing of Boris Johnson's Brexit enabling legislation at a second reading stage mean that the ultimate approval of the deal was a forgone conclusion?  

Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian says "no":

What does it mean? First, don’t fall for the hype that says that parliament approved Johnson’s deal. It did not. MPs simply voted for it to receive a second reading, some of them motivated by the desire not to endorse it but to amend it. As Labour’s Gloria De Piero confessed, she voted yes, “not because I support the deal but because I don’t”. That 30-vote majority will include MPs who wanted to propose UK membership of a customs union, others keen on conditioning the deal on public support in a confirmatory referendum. Screen out the Tory spin: those MPs should not be counted as backers of the deal.

As for the defeat on the timetable, that is the result of what now looks like a tactical misjudgment by the government. By making such a fetish of the 31 October deadline – arbitrarily imposed by Emmanuel Macron when Theresa May missed the last one – Johnson painted himself into a corner whereby even a delay of a few days looked like a humiliation. Both Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Clarke signalled that it might not need much more than a few extra days to undertake the necessary scrutiny – though Nikki da Costa, until recently Johnson’s head of legislative affairs, had said it required at least four weeks – which is hardly that long to wait. Instead of taking that pragmatic course, Johnson felt compelled to call the whole thing to a halt.

Why? The obvious explanation is that this gives the PM a pretext to grab what he really wants: an early election framed as a battle to get Brexit done, with him as the people’s tribune pitted against those wicked remainer saboteurs.

But another explanation suggests itself, too. Any period of scrutiny is unpalatable to Johnson, because he fears that the threadbare coalition that might exist to back his deal will unravel once it engages in closer examination of the withdrawal agreement. Its erosion of workers’ rights; its creation of a new no-deal cliff edge in 2020; its entrenchment of a hard Brexit in law – all those dangers would only become more visible under the spotlight of protracted (or even normal) Commons scrutiny. Bits of his coalition – especially among those Labour MPs who backed him on Tuesday – would begin to flake off.