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I find it reductionist to the point it loses it's meaning. Actually the whole human body is constantly growing, not just cancers. I'm am growing new skin cells as we speak, approximately every x3 weeks I shed old skin cells so need new ones.That objection is already covered in the very title used by HN (" If the purpose of a company is merely growth"). It's also covered extensively in the article.
And your counter-analogy is wrong anyway: the whole human body is not "constantly growing" (it does this only or mostly for its first 2 decades, about the same time we stop getting any taller).
It's constantly renewing (in your words: "I shed old skin cells so need new ones"), which is different from growing (even if we say that we have to "grow" new cells - we also have to grow new plants to keep a farm going, but that doesn't mean that the farm itself has to grow - much less to endelessly try to find new profit avenues. It's the latter sense the article uses).
>If they don't then they will die, the same way I will die if my body stops growing new cells to replace the old one.
Which is neither here nor there, since "growing new cells" to replace old ones is not the same as growth in the commonly understood sense and the one used in the article. In the "growing new sells" sense, businesses without a "growth-above-everything" mission still "grow" (renew) lots of things: their stock, ocassionally introduce new products, find new customers, and so on.
And of course the examples the author gives of companies without "growth", have survived more (e.g. the Japanese companies operating for centuries), than companies that get gigantic and whose purpose is to maximize shareholder profit...