The online world is not particularly horrible; we overwhelmingly use it by choice, not out of necessity, and the benefits far outstrip the risks. Sure, it's also far from being great, and the genuine difficulty of designing complex systems in a secure way plays a role in this (heck, between all the interested parties, we can't even really define what "secure" means in practical terms). But it's not because everybody else is dumb.
While I generally hate analogies like this, I think there are quite a few parallels between the online world and the physical realm, where we seldom settle on absolute security. You have a $10 door lock that can be opened with a paperclip, protecting probably in excess of $5,000 in electronics within your home. In that realm, we are far better accustomed to the trade-offs, in part because we have more intuitive data about what can go wrong. We also take a more dim view of a burglar than of a hacker, which makes us assign the blame a bit differently.
In any case, with online security in particular, there some paths forward, including fairly plausible incremental strategies (better UX in the browsers and operating systems, better developer guidance, better mitigations, a culture of fuzzing and other security testing as a part of QA, etc). There are also some ambitious revolutionary dreams ("New everything! In Rust!") that may actually pan out if enough people get behind them. But I'm not sure what this article is hoping to achieve.