I agree with sentiment of the article, but I don't care about PointerEvents in particular. Good UI needs to have separate code paths for touch and mouse anyway, e.g. swiping with a mouse feels stupid.
For trivial stuff TouchEvents already simulate mouse events and every new technology will — these events are our common compatibility layer already.
TouchEvents are a bit of a mess, but it's fixable and it's being worked on, e.g. standardising simulated mouse events, removing click delay, adding ability to prevent scroll from any touchmove event.
TouchEvents even sometimes nicer to work with, e.g. touchend will be fired on the same element that received touchstart (there are edge cases in there, but I've never ran into them), while this is not guaranteed with pointerup, so it's easy to write bad code that causes dragged elements become "sticky".