His critique is more about the impact of the full ecosystem effect of the Tidyverse, not what you are referring to, which is just the dplyr semantics. The Tidyverse demands that it's many related packages use tidy data principles and lock users into that approach, which differs from base-R. Much of this discussion is really just a debate about dplyr and magrittr rather than the fragmentation that the broader tidyverse has brought on. All that said, I agree with many commenters that the Tidyverse's improvements to speed of development can more than offset the speed of execution issues, at least for small-to-medium datasets.