It strikes me that the author bemoans the state / lack of software literacy immediately after they take responsibility for obfuscating the descriptive parameters "callback" and "errback" in favor of "deferred" which became "promise" in the name of aesthetics. "callback" might be ugly but at least it says what it does and does what it says.

You say "obfuscating", the author I suspect would say "abstracting", so it's a bit of a matter of perspective. I think the point still stands, because Deferred has become a useful way to think about these collections of callbacks in async systems, so having that concept allows for a literary shorthand, which seems to be an important point of elevating literature.