The author also seriously recommends Arch Linux and Tumbleweed as alternatives. Anyone who ever maintained a server in an enterprise production environment knows how valuable the kind of stability that the author criticisms is. Not everyone lives in a DevOps environment where you can "move fast and break things".

He does have a point about unmaintained packages, though. Debian probably shouldn't package things if they cannot support it over the lifetime of the release. Why would I ever want to use a two-years-old Wordpress version? I never understood why those kinds of applications are even packaged at all.

Most sysadmins deal with this by including a third party repository for applications and Elasticsearch (any many others), often by the authors themselves, which takes care of security and version updates. This eliminates most of the concerns. You get a rock-solid operating system and an up to date application on top of it. Web applications like Wordpress or Owncloud aren't usually deployed using distro packages at all.