I think an unspoken aspect to that principle, but very much along the same thought lines as the article, is: Try something new, don't try to shoehorn this product into your existing method.
"Configurability is the root of all evil" because if you can change everything, you'll eventually change it into the same stagnant workflow you've had all along.
Take for example his mentioning of lack of 'man'. man has been with us since 1971. Lynx came 20 years later in 1992. There's no information that man encapsulates that couldn't be represented in hypertext - so why haven't the majority of shells moved away from man already?
Sometimes that crutch of configuration can hobble you worse than it'll support you.
The shells have no relation to man, except that being programs they typically have man pages. When you run man, it parses some file (often using nroff) and outputs it to standard output, usually through some form of pager.
A shell can't "move away" from man. It could ship with its documentation in a different format, or the authors could even develop a new documentation reader... but if you think man and the shell should somehow be specially related, you're forgetting how Unix works.
"Configurability is the root of all evil" because if you can change everything, you'll eventually change it into the same stagnant workflow you've had all along.
Take for example his mentioning of lack of 'man'. man has been with us since 1971. Lynx came 20 years later in 1992. There's no information that man encapsulates that couldn't be represented in hypertext - so why haven't the majority of shells moved away from man already?
Sometimes that crutch of configuration can hobble you worse than it'll support you.