This article has reduced the argument for staging, calling it unnecessary. Its upto the devops to use staging effectively. It you have a waterflow like deployment and useless e2e tests running in staging, then it wont be helpful. Instead, if you use staging as another prod (Blue Green deployment cough cough.. ) then, it would be a lot more useful.

Than blaming staging env as a whole, I would blame archaic devops practices for SaaS.