Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, no offense to the author, but this article read like one written by someone who really doesn't know much about keyboards. There is a whole slew of different silent, non-clicky, tactile and linear switches to choose from, as well as sound dampening o-rings.
I think this article is written from the perspective of a satisficer- it sufficiently meets the requirements he cares about. This is the perspective of most consumers for most of the goods we purchase. It's good to get a well-considered perspective from somebody that isn't deep into the "enthusiast" category of keyboard purchasers.
I'm not going to mechanical keyboard conferences, lubing my key switches and I had no idea what a sound dampening o-ring was until I read the parent comment.
I haven't gotten super into keyboards because I haven't been negatively effected enough for me to go down that rabbit hole of finding something top tier that covers everything I want to do in a better way with 0 compromises. For example, typing into a terminal with 50ms of input delay is a horrendous experience so that lead me down a path of researching, finding and writing about monitors and terminals with extremely low latency which I think is safe to say is enthusiast level.
The same goes for audio equipment. I have a 3,000+ post comparing a few headphones, going as far as analyzing frequency ranges to help find the most neutral headphones so I can hear back my voice accurately while recording courses.
And for mice, back in the day when I played games more seriously I would put custom teflon pads on the bottom of the mouse to make it glide more smoothly and consistently.
But with keyboards. I am satisfied with a fairly low noise, tactile feeling keyboard that doesn't skip or double press keys so I can chug along at ~80 WPM as a non-home row typist. I'm sure there's better, but the pain just isn't there to go deeper down the hole.