I agree, but I'll go further than you - I don't think this essay is confusing at all. It's simply nonsense - the kind of thing someone clever writes when they're discussing a subject completely outside their area of competence.
CS can be a craft. It's not one of the arts, not even if it's beautifully put together, because the arts are not primarily about technique - they're about capturing and distilling human experiences using allusions and associations to (re)create those experiences. Fluent technique is a useful tool that help with that, but it's not the point.
(Modern art is a bit more limited than that, but that's more or less what art meant for most of Western history.)
The experiences created by the most timeless art are focused, but also ambiguous and complicated. You can get lost in them, and although there's often a clear theme, you can't define the rest of what's happening with absolute final precision.
That's almost exactly the opposite of what good code does. Which is why "That's a clever, clean solution" is an experience that exists in the craftsman's world, and is either peripheral or completely absent from an artist's view.
>I think dropping "science" from "Computer Science" would help immeasurably.
At my university the joke was always that it should be called "Computer Studies." Only a nugget of algorithmic research is genuinely scientific, and that lives in a tiny corner of the rest of the Pure Math. There could be a lot more formal provability, but going down that route would put a lot of programmers out of work, because the level of difficulty is much higher than that needed to crank out some JavaScript.
What's left is usually neither rigorous nor beautiful.