This is analogous to Google declaring one fine day that its getting out the advertising business, but adding security features to do so. MZ describes steps to improve security and retooling history features to have less immortality and permanence, but people already share facebook posts and profiles as images, not only as stateful markup. People will continue to expose each other and there's essentially no way Facebook can guarantee privacy in that regard. Limiting partner access to user data will ultimately be a trade-off of what they can afford to lose and that's not a commitment to privacy either.
His proposed strategy doesn't really makes sense and seems like misdirection and lip-service. You can't change the way people use Facebook, but you can forgo any pretense of privacy, which may be the only thing that can honestly and realistically be done.
Otherwise I have to say this is the worst advice for any engineer building a commercial website. Maybe if someone went back in time 10 years, this might look like a solution, but there is a reason all of this is left behind. I've been a web developer for 20 years now and browser development has finally graduated to real software engineering.
The author has a laundry list of grievances based on their own experiences. It's clear that these are merely opinions though, and they can be taken at face value.
"Frameworks and complexity === insanely long cycle times"
This is simply not true and it's purely subjective. Any developer using Continuous Development can roll out changes to production in a matter of hours, if not a few days. Sophisticated apps need to be modular and engineered for a simple workflow, automated testing and a clear separation of concerns. There is no point to setting yourself up for defeat, and if anyone followed this advice, that's exactly what would happen.
There's a clear distinction between the FUD of naysayers compared to people with more sophisticated levels of development experience. I am not sure someone with this mindset could even get past a phone screen. egad.
That's quite an exaggerated presumption. Office for mac has been around for years. VSC will more than likely give sublime a run for its money as they are very similar on the Mac platform. Just because microsoft ports VS, it doesn't reveal anything other than giving developers that prefer Macs another IDE choice. You can get a MBP without function keys and just because Apple has decided evolve their approach to the keyboard, it doesn't mean anything beyond that. It's very interesting that this has become such a hot topic in the dev community. Apple isn't abandoning devs, pure and simple.
His proposed strategy doesn't really makes sense and seems like misdirection and lip-service. You can't change the way people use Facebook, but you can forgo any pretense of privacy, which may be the only thing that can honestly and realistically be done.