Everything you said after "this article is silly" kinda seems like just restating the exact point of the article. The central idea is that the massive costs of

Everything you said after "this article is silly" kinda seems like just restating the exact point of the article. The central idea is that the massive costs of writing code that adheres to a specification takes away resources from the task of understanding the problem space well enough to create a correct specification. That is, incidental complexity overwhelms essential complexity in modern software engineering. The various avenues of study mentioned in the article are attempts at addressing that imbalance. Which is pretty much what you said.