Yes but my conclusion would not be that Decibels are ridiculous, but that "People don't understand Decibels".

Decibels are okay. They are useful. They work. The problem is that people use referenced decibel values without adding anything that would allow us to understand which reference was used.

Maybe one could have come up with a better numeric way of doing the same thing (I am missing a proposal for this in the blog post), but then you'd have the XKCD-yet-another-standard problem. Everything uses dB for ages now, so dB it is or you need to convert between one and another all the time.

As an audio engineer I have no issue with dB as a unit. It is much better than using raw amplitude numbers.