The article is unfortunately ambiguous. It's pretty clear from the comments here that there are two different camps in terms of how people interpreted it.
However, it's quite clear to me that the author defines 'winning' as reaching a consensus on one person or the other's point of view, and 'losing' as battling to a stalemate or having one person impose their solution on the other. It's about the team winning or losing (or, to put it in other words, "if we do it well we all win, and if we mess up then we all lose"). 'Picking your battles' is an English idiom that means avoiding confrontations.
It's a little light on specifics, but it's not terrible advice. In fact, it's the exact same advice you are trying to impart here.
Even if you don't agree with that interpretation, I think it behooves you as a HN-famous person to at least consider the more charitable interpretation before publicly branding the author as someone whose "advice could quickly turn a functional team into a non-functional one."
Please consider re-reading the article with a view to trying to understand how other people may have interpreted it, and the author may have intended it, differently. Failing that, at least take some of your own advice and give up your scorched-earth battle to the death with the author and every commenter who read it differently. We're all losing right now.