The original premise, from TFA, is

    Another is the Twitter-optimized “you’re a terrible engineer if you ever store booleans in a database” clever trick

You appear to agree on all of these points. I’m not arguing that, should you need to timetrack a bool, bool—>timestamp is a bad way to do it. As I’ve said, the universal application of it is only stated because it’s free to do. But being free doesn’t make it useful, and since you agree on that as well, I don’t know if there’s any argument actually occurring here.

I think we agree more than we disagree on how to go about designing a schema, but that my narrow disagreement is that I think a.) timestamps and enums are better choices than booleans most of the time (without judging anyone who uses booleans to be a "terrible engineer", it's not malpractice) and b.) that's a legitimate trick of the trade rather than something "mindless".

I would agree that throwing a table together based on Twitter vibes without actually designing it will only work like a stuck clock, but I think that goes without saying. I kinda disregard opinions attributed to nebulous Twitter posters and not specific people. I think when you conflate people's opinions together like that you reduce their position to a caricature. If you poll that group of people almost all of them will have a more nuanced opinion.