I agree that there is a class of games that can be easily implemented with a prebuilt engine, but this is not one of them.
This "class of games" includes more or less everything that a single developer without a very costly art department can produce. If your game can not be implemented with a prebuilt engine, it's really something extraordinary.
That said, I agree with your previous comment about performance. Rarely, if ever, should using one programming language over another limit the performance of any game so much that it would severely affect what you can and can not do gameplay- or feature wise. Unless you use some highly dynamic scripting language that fundamentally doesn't fit the problem domain, of course (I wouldn't write a 3D engine in Python or Ruby, for example).
I can somewhat understand some of the other arguments of choosing C over C++ (primarily build times), but for the most part the problems the author has with C++ appear to be philosophical. You can have almost everything you want in C++, if you're prepared to use it differently depending on your requirements. In terms of performance, it really is true that optimization only pays off for small sections of your code, so it doesn't make any sense to switch languages for that. You can most definitely make an extremely efficient data-oriented entity-component system in C++ without going having to jump through any hoops, for example.
I'm sure everything from minecraft and Dwarf Fortress through Battlefield 4 could have been implemented in a prebuilt engine.