I completely disagree with almost the entirety of the article. It’s all about prior experience building large things many times yourself, not using some framework or other external abstraction.

When you have done this many times you absolutely can design a large application without touching the code. This is part planning and risk analysis experience and part architecture experience. You absolutely need a lot of experience creating large applications multiple times and going through that organizational grind but prior experience in management and writing high level plans is extremely helpful.

You’re speaking of implementing yet another system of a familiar kind, I.e. a new project. The OP says that generic design works for new projects. He’s mostly talking about designing new features to be added to an existing system, in which case the design has to be contingent on the existing system.

Why are you rewriting the same application a second time?

I've personally yet to have a situation where that comes up. And every application I've ever worked on has its architecture evolve over time, as behavior changes and new domain concepts are identified.

There are recurring patterns (one might even call them Design Patterns), but by the time we've internalized them we have even less need for up-front planning. Why write the doc when you can just implement the code?