Google's Material Design is a political choice

I cannot take this author seriously. By adapting your product to fit a current design trend, you are not necessarily "supporting Google" - rather you're supporting your users who are familiar with certain patterns.

However, to applaud "Web Brutalism" (It's nice that they put "web" there, since the term 'brutalism' in digital work is so misappropriated it's not funny) as an alternative goes to show that this author is not necessarily against Material/Bootstrap as a design choice, but more against it because they feel that form is more important than function.

This is not a good position to take if you want to develop intuitive software in my opinion.

They go on to contradict themselves as well, saying that you should disregard form and recognizable patterns ("If for modernists form should follow functions, for post-modernists, form is the function."), then immediately makes the comment "Legibility-communication must never be impaired by an a priori aesthetics."

This whole article screams "First year academic" to me.

Eh, seems like a stretch to me. At the end of the day making usable UIs is hard, and any decent guideline that a non-visual person like me can follow is a good thing. My thanks goes out to all the designers and UI engineers that have put the time into producing high quality documentation.