The NYTimes has been hostile to tech for as long as I can remember, and my memory on the matter goes back to the 90's when Thomas Friedman was writing about how our jobs were going to India practically every other week. After Google had taken off, that stopped, and they changed their tone to some sort of embrace-and-extend.
It's been many many years of this. It's not going to change. The signal-to-noise ratio isn't going to improve. To that set of folks, we'll always be a bunch of picks and shovels. There's a subset of the liberal artsy crowd that will always see STEM as being lesser intellectually, and that's who these articles are written for. To be sure, that doesn't mean that STEM folks should be anti-liberal-arts. Folks on the engineering side need to own what that side of intellectual life offers, because you can bet that there'll be other (traditional-management-and-corporate) folks leveraging the liberal artsy side and learning what they can about tech so they can "manage" it. To which end, I would also consider this article a reminder and temperature read.
I'm indifferent if the narrative would drive away some talented students into other industries. Raw talent isn't all that there is. There were plenty of 10x programmers in the field before tech got big. And not everyone going into the big giants would be so good in a startup. If you ask me, there's other stuff at play, like the competition between programmers today, and the drive to climb the ladder above all else – those things more or less negate whatever benefit the bump in talent was, because those things don't help startups. Those things are much more readily harnessed by the truly big companies.