I think you may be taking the headline too seriously; I think the OP is really arguing that these headers constitute a reasonable amount of bandwidth, and maybe we should just switch them off if they're not providing any value?
For what it's worth, the author is listed as a "Developer Advocate".
So it seems they are starting to fall into the propaganda mode to paint over the issue rather than admit that it is time for them to start innovating again.
Surrogate keys and quite cache busting used to be Fastly special sauce but since 2014 it is rather standard.
This is literally nothing more than a minor blog post that points out that some of us are still using headers we might not need to. Finding anything else in that is utterly baffling.