It sounds radical, but it is very reasonable when you bring in the proper context.
It is not talking about that kind of configuration like keybinding and color scheme, which is simple to implement, simple to understand, and something most users would happily play with. Fish even encourages users to customize such things by providing a web interface.
A good choice for the proper context here is the 180 options that zsh offers (http://linux.die.net/man/1/zshoptions). All of them exist for a reason -- mostly because "this is cool but some will dislike it / it will break other features, so let's make it an option".
This strategy does its job in keeping old users. But the problem is that you only add options and never remove options, and over the course of development, many options are used by fewer and fewer people. When a new user picks up zsh, it behaves almost the same as 20 years ago -- because breaking changes are introduced as options that are off by default -- and you never know which combination of the 180 options will give you a good experience. They either get frustrated and not use zsh, or copy someone else's .zshrc and never care about which options do what. Either way, it is a clear sign that 180 options for a shell is simply too much.
And from that frustration, is born the sentiment that you just read.