Why is astrophotography hard?
For photography you should plan at least $500 for a tracking mount, you might start even with the cameras lenses or a small refractor telescope. "Barndoor" mounts are a good alternative for not too long focal lengths.
Photographic mounts for the recommended 8 inch newtonian would run at $ 1500+ and require precise setup.
The good news is, that modern digital cameras with interchangeable lenses are pretty capable for astrophotography, so if you own one of those, there is no reason not to try it. So the strong warning in the article was to set the proper expectations.
You will probably need a camera with raw support for this to work, because each individual exposure will be extremely noisy, and any in-camera noise reduction will destroy too much detail. You will probably also need at least two bright stars in frame for alignment to work.
And if you have a huge number of images you can also keep only those with low atmospheric distortion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging
The same principle could be used to keep only those images with little tracking-induced motion blur.
But just like, say, wedding photography the actual execution to create good results requires a lot of experience and expensive kit. You can catch some passable images of the night sky with a basic SLR and lens just like at Aunt Maud's wedding, but beginning star-watchers see those magnificent photos of galaxies in magazines and to avoid huge disappointment it's kinder to set expectations at the outset.
Plus, we're all spoiled by photos made by people with multimillion dollar telescopes... so the end product will be shit probably. There's some cool things that can be done wide angle but those have been done to death.