This is nonsense. His key argument is that hard tasks are reducible to simple tasks, and therefore they are actually not all that hard. Ask anyone who's implem

This is nonsense. His key argument is that hard tasks are reducible to simple tasks, and therefore they are actually not all that hard. Ask anyone who's implemented, say, Paxos, and ask them whether because the individual steps were easy the whole system is therefore easy. Or indeed any other distributed system. Just because something can eventually be decomposed into simpler things does not mean that it is a fundamentally simple construct, nor does it mean that a programmer who can manage the simpler constituents is competent to handle the overall system.