This article does nothing to demolish willpower as a concept. It's strikingly poorly argued. Yes, there are tactical transformations of concepts or situations you can make to encourage yourself to do the right thing. If you want to diet, not keeping potato chips in the house is easier than having them there and white-knuckle resisting them every moment of your life (or it is for me at least). However, both of those things take a certain level of willpower. The second one may take exponentially more, and therefore be a bad choice to make, but it takes some level of will to even avoid buying the chips.

The author tries to present it as though the mere fact that you can have cognitive strategies for improving these decisions destroys the concept of willpower. But it doesn't. Both of these things can be true. We need to get better at teaching people how to re-conceptualize things to improve their willpower, but they also need to have some in the first place! If you have no willpower, all the strategies in the world aren't going to prevent you from eating that cupcake.

I will also add that I am a former addict, and had the same experience as his patient. A big part of quitting for me was indeed a reconceptualization of the issue. But that doesn't mean it didn't also take will. If you tell people in treatment that all they need to do is reframe their addiction, you're lying to them, and they're not going to get better. Yes, reframing is important, and so is a life-architecture that avoids dangerous situations, but there are going to be moments in their lives where their drug of choice is available to them, and in those moments, there is no substitute for will.