E.g. mobile apps just save their state all the time and revert when you reopen them. Imagine if MS Word didn't ask you before it exits, but instead it asks you when you open it if you want to restore previous state.
Sure you can "Just save state all the time", but doing so involves tradeoffs. Tradeoffs which were not addressed at all in the article.
Your MS Word example is exactly what OpenOffice does when it's been closed without saving. It's really obnoxious. I was hoping to read some UX insight into how to make those kinds of actions less obnoxious without losing their helpful functionality when it's needed.
In general I agree with the core idea of the article. But it lacked useful discussion about the hard UX problems involved, opting instead for some easy in-application examples.
An initial ideas I had, fairly trivial in the context of OpenOffice and Word asking to return to your previous state:
If a short period of time has elapsed since closing the application, simply resume state. Short period of time would have to be determine, of course. But it's fair to say that if I close an application and open it again within a minute, I probably want to resume the state. Additional conditions could be added based on testing: didn't save in the last close might be a good indicator.