Author successfully drove engagement with psychological baits like bashing commonly accepted tools and practices and being intentionally obscure so a lot of people would comment about it.
Or, author has so much more experience than you, that his conclusions can't possibly make sense in your world. Not saying that's the case, but it's certainly possible. The more wisdom, the less need for rules and conventions.
That being said, I do feel like we have to learn to communicate over these boundaries if we want to evolve faster, as opposed to mostly repeating the same mistakes over and over.
Even if that’s the case, the exposition is quite poor and hard to follow. It doesn’t exhibit a lot of clarity of thinking on the author’s part, or at least it doesn’t translate to his writing. That’s what I meant by “confused”.
It's not really designed for a broad audience, so I share your surprise that it got upvoted so much. Writing for a broad audience takes me a lot of effort, which isn't always worthwhile.
FWIW this trail might help fill in context:
https://akkartik.name/freewheeling (this was designed for a broad audience, so is like a snapshot backup where the links below are incremental backups)
Strong opinion that there is no wisdom in not using anything other than code to produce software for yourself. It's a personal choice. Selling it like it's an epiphany is definitely kind of a weird move.
For your personal projects you can choose any language, define any constraints, do whatever you like which is what I think the author is trying to communicate here, and that is fine. But sprinkling a bit of huge discovery/realization on top is not so much.
Making strong assertions without any evidence or data to back it up is not "wisdom". I agree with other people: the author is simply burnt out by software (which is fine) and is jut YOLOing his code.
Given that the author has been exploring these themes* throughout the years since I first encountered them, I've got a strong weighting for the former.
* with varied approaches; I even recall a "test all the things" experiment
I really wonder what about it made it be upvoted to first place.