1983 was they year when I got into computers and programming, and I am 100% with the author here.
We have expanded the scope, to be sure, in that time but we've done it without a very deep understanding of the fundamental processes and so, in short, we've made a mess of it. We were in such a rush to make the perfect not the enemy of the good, that what we have isn't even really good anymore.
While I agree with the sentiment, the comparison is unfair and inaccurate. Everything on computers today didn't exist in 1983, particularly his concrete web example. A better title would be "some things on computers today are slower that other things on computers in 1983". Not so attention grabbing though, so why even go on Twitter. Almost everything on Twitter was better in 1983.
This being said, programming today is no longer about efficiency and quality, it has been taken over by code monkeys that will happily copy/paste encyclopedia sized code pieces and put them together in something vaguely functional, under a culture of move fast and break things, because companies want to sell shiny trinkets as "interesting features", and users want to buy that. And modern hardware is good enough to take a lot of this pieced together software so why even bother?
Not almost! Everything was better in 1983. Everything already existed. Twitter is a good example: A really shitty newsgroup server glued onto a unusable client. Its eternal September on steroids. What a joke!
We have expanded the scope, to be sure, in that time but we've done it without a very deep understanding of the fundamental processes and so, in short, we've made a mess of it. We were in such a rush to make the perfect not the enemy of the good, that what we have isn't even really good anymore.