This is probably one of the theory vs. practice issues. While I admit that the article is mostly correct then again, in practice, I haven't had much trouble with Linux in the 00's and 10's while using Debian based distributions exclusively.
Surely I am not immune to the shortcomings of Linux but I don't remember having had to tweak my system as part of routine maintenance for... years. This was commonplace in the 90's. Merely upgrading or changing your X setup required tweaking configuration files, setting modelines and whatnot. I don't even know where the X configuration files live anymore. While the foundation is shallow, things generally work to the extent that I don't have to do "maintenance" on my Linux computers. Even external displays seem to work mostly just fine when presenting.
I haven't missed binary compatibility once: the distros compile everything anyway when libraries update. Compared to clinging to the cruft that makes 30 year old Windows programs work in Windows 10, I feel I'm better off with Linux even if I have to kill pulseaudio a couple of times each year and there's a slight chance that one of my laptops won't resume after suspend if it's unplugged.
I'm not saying that these Linux problems aren't problems. They exist and when they hit you, it hurts like hell. But my point is that Linux is imperfect as is the real world and people just tend to work around imperfections, again, like in the real world. So, mostly things work 5x better than 10 years ago and 50x better than 20 years ago.