Typical HN blogspam. A blog post that makes vague but incredibly certain claims, generalizing about an entire industry, with no evidence outside a single person's limited experience. Yet there he is at the end of his post, asking people to hire him for consulting. But it's perfect for HN, because it gives people in the comments something to complain about, driving up engagement.
I will admit, though, the SaaS tech industry as a whole has a problem. The cargo cult of tech has convinced itself that SaaS is special. That it's never done. That it must be never finished, never stable, always changing, always breaking. Like it's some immutable law of nature.
This of course is a convenient lie. Before every business was an online service, software worked like every other product in the world. You built it to do a thing, you tested it thoroughly to ensure it didn't have defects, and then you coordinated one large release. No constant changes or late Friday deploys. No schema changes destroying columns. There was no on-call, because there was no 24/7 service. There were floppy disks and CDROMs, and people running software on their own computers, and a very small number of 24/7 enterprise systems shared by lots of users (mostly run by ISPs, and one or two large tech companies and industry bodies).
But you can deliver online software like it's desktop software. You can ensure your software is bug-free before you burn your master disk. But then you don't get to skip all those time-consuming tests. Then you don't get to ship your features faster than your competitor. Then you don't get to do A/B testing and micro-tweaks and experiments and feature flags and blue/green deploys. We want to do all the things, at any time, with no consequences. So on-call is still a thing, because people want to have their cake and eat it too.
The actual infrastructure on the backend shared by millions of users? Not actually hard to maintain. It's the same shit as 20 years ago, but much, much easier. Make sure the disks don't fill up. Auto-scale the VMs and containers. Design your apps to not exceed network bandwidth. There's really not much else to break. The only thing that breaks a system is changing it, or bugs from not enough testing. So do the testing, and the bare minimum of autoscaling in the cloud, and nothing should ever break in production.
But constantly mutating SaaS, without due diligence, is too addictive. Nobody's going to abandon the freedom of doing whatever the fuck they want, just to keep from waking people up in the middle of the night. The business people sure as fuck aren't going to abandon their "competitive advantage". And devs who don't care if their software works or not don't want to abandon untested deploys from their laptops. So on-call is here to stay.