Not at all. The author makes the assumption that "the developer experience is often poor" when working with APIs. That happens often, but not because APIs are e

Not at all. The author makes the assumption that "the developer experience is often poor" when working with APIs. That happens often, but not because APIs are elitist or anything like that, but because they're poorly designed and poorly documented. Otherwise, working with APIs is a bliss, if you're a programmer, it's several orders of magnitude better than working with files. Anyways, APIs are not even incompatible with files. APIs don't just return JSON or XML, any API can have an endpoint that returns a file. And the fuss about authentication/keys doesn't go away with files: if the data is protected, you've still got to provide the credentials, regardless whether the data is coming in the form of a file or a JSON document