The problem with CSS, as far as I'm concerned, is not that it cannot solve the task, but that it isn't intuitive and that you need to be aware of lots of 'tricks'/workarounds to get fairly simple concepts to work.
But the sort of talks that the writer is talking about annoy me too. CSS is rubbish but most people know that already. It's unimaginative and lazy to constantly repeat it. However rubbish it is, we still have to deal with it for the moment.
These days I just think of CSS as a low-level language that is best left to compilers and so on. In the same way I don't want to hand-code Abstract Syntax Trees, I don't want to write CSS when I can use a higher-level alternative that spits out decent CSS.
I worked at an e-commerce company at that time and it was corporate policy to have webpages render perfectly in all browsers. That involved a lot more workarounds and tricks then what we see and use these days... Using document mode's to trick browsers into rendering stuff different, faux columns,... .
I see a lot of younger people bitching about JavaScript and CSS but they have a lot more luxury (also regarding tools) that was available in the past. Which doesn't mean that we should stop improving the state of CSS/JS today, but to put things a bit in perspective.