I think the author's point is that despite being perceived as low-level, C doesn't really differ from, say, Java on the last bullet.

In other words, a programmer who sits down and uses C and not Java might think, "I am being forced to pay attention to irrelevant things and think in unnatural ways, but that's because I am writing fast code using operations that map to operations done by the physical machine. In a higher-level language like Java, more of these details are out of my control because they are abstracted away by the language and handled by the compiler."

I think the article does a great job dismantling this point of view, and telling the story that C is not so different from Java, aside from being unsafe and ill-specified.