Make sure you recall that the first and highest priority in the mwod approach is motor control. This is where the glute activation thing comes in. This is where quad dominance is dealt with. If your squat is restricted, your first thought should be “do I actually know how to squat as well as I think I do”. You need a good set of movement cues that will create the right patterns of activation in the first place. That is how those issues can be solved in the long term. 

Once you have improved your proficiency in the movement, even understanding it just a little bit better, then you will also improve your understanding of and ability to apply the mobility drills. It then becomes a game of improving position and increasing your range of motion in the movement you are now more familiar with.

In my experience, if you have a poor understanding of how to squat really skillfully (for example), your ability to effectively employ a lot of more complex mobilizations is going to be greatly hindered. At the same time, however, if you treat each mobilization (the position-based ones rather than the smashing techniques) as correlates for those movements (the squat mob positions closely resemble a squat, for instance) they can provide you with an opportunity to figure the movement out while restoring some mobility.

In fact, the great majority of the time that I’m working with new clients (non-athletes) I won’t have them do any mobility work beyond some simple smashing stuff for recovery, simply because they are often learning to do stuff like squat and press for the first time. That’s complicated enough, and most of their improvements in position and range of motion are going to come just from learning how to do those movements more efficiently.

Your approach to implementing the mwod tools cannot be the old flexibility model of stretch out all the tight stuff. It needs razor sharp intent, and a desire to constantly better your understanding of what you’re doing. These drills, even the smashes, are high-skill recovery and prep activities for a beginner, and the better you get at them the better they work.