It's hardly some horrendous controversial idea, nor unique to software engineering.
At several places I worked (and others for which I asked in job interviews), the general amount which companies get away with (and employees find bearable) seems to be <= 5 weeks of on-call per employee and year.
And obviously you're being paid to be on standby, and then paid for your overtime should an incident occur.
Devs think they're hot stuff, when in reality we're probably one of the most abused professions out there. (I'm talking about regular devs, not people who were born in wealth/went to good schools etc)
At my former employer I was on an on-call rotation; I'm obviously not now it's a 'former' employer, so the building analogy doesn't really hold up. (And not just leaving the company, but e.g. my former colleagues now working on something else at the same company aren't on call for the software they wrote but are no longer responsible for.)
The article did not mention anything about pay or compensation for oncall.
The best I get in job interviews is usually a mention that there is a rota every X period. Then have to poke interviewers trying to guess what is it like without coming up as too negative, "when is the last time you worked on a week end?" "when is the last time you were awaken in the middle of the night?"