The article is neither vapid nor pointless. You're just reading it as a technical proposal when the author didn't mean it to be one. Articles like this are meant to be nucleating points for vibe shifts, usually in the form of a preference cascade.

Remember how the similarly vapid and pointless Agile Manifesto mysteriously got everyone talking about writing software more flexibly? You're not looking at technical engineering. You're looking at social engineering.

In this instance, if the vibe shift attempt is successful (most are not) we'll stop whining about how much CSS sucks and blaming it for our failures and start talking about how to fill CSS's functionality gaps and make it do what practitioners actually need.