Which I now see was the point. Women are traditionally expected to care about their partner's preferences even if they don't really understand or care themselves, while men are expected to be practical, cold and uncaring. Thus gender roles contribute to an imbalance in the distribution of emotional labour.
Did it though?
A lot of life admin isn't satisfying or enjoyable, it's just a drudge. Are you suggesting that relentless, menial work with no end in sight comes naturally to anyone?
I'm single, and I've found ways to keep life admin to a minimum, but when you're running a household there's tons of small jobs that add up. It becomes hard to switch off. I've seen it happen multiple times.
If she did not care about housework, she would just not do it, not hire anyone else to do it, and the house would be a mess. That's what the husband does and it works for him because that's his personality. He only cares when someone important to him nags him about it, and he has to "work" to at least pretend to care.
The actual work of cleaning the house he did, eventually. He never did the emotional work of convincingly pretending to really care about it.
Read the article again. This is the key part...
"I was gifted a necklace for Mother's Day while my husband stole away to deep clean the bathrooms, leaving me to care for our children as the rest of the house fell into total disarray."
If the idea behind Mother's Day is to give mothers a day off, can you see why the gift of getting cleaners in would've worked, but the gift of offering to do the cleaning did not?
He technically did the cleaning. He screwed up because he didn't consider what the point of cleaning was (like you say, giving her wife a day off) and he just did something that he thought was approximately equivalent to what she literally asked.
I call that "not really caring". If he cared, he would have realized he should have cleaned the day before and given "a clean bathroom on Mother's Day" as a present instead of "the act of cleaning the bathroom on Mother's Day".
I call it "not really understanding". The cleaning was most likely more work than a few more phone calls to cleaners for quotes would've been. If it was about not caring then why wouldn't the husband put in the minimum effort and get in someone else to do the cleaning?
To be honest, the author's culture is alien to me and I only have stereotypes (TV and movies, mostly) to go on.
In the article she mentions that she controls the budget, so it was probably over the budget he had to work with.