I certainly agree that "Normal PDFs are simple, reliable, and interoperable". And yes, virtually every PDF out there is designed to be printable first, and in that context they're pretty great, and the flaws that they do have are mostly flaws created by the choices of the humans who made them.

But I strongly disagree that the article is arguing against a straw man.

Too many websites, especially from either very large organizations or very small ones, when asking "how should we architect our new side", answer "we already have some printable documents... let's make most of our pages PDFs!"

And TFA's point is: that's a disaster.