> An example of year-long projects I have seen waterfall’d successfully are IP protocol implementations where the RFC is clear, base frameworks exist, and the org has engineers with decades of individual experience implementing protocols in the same framework.

Article responds to you with:

“For most of us, the majority of software work is not like this. We work on poorly-understood systems and cannot predict exactly what must be done in advance. Most programming in large systems is research…”

It is good to target the strongest point, not the weakest.