I haven't read the article yet, but I would assume they want versioning, history, checksumming and verification. All that stuff is worthwhile, it's just unfortunate npm is such a heavy dependency to achieve it.
The official docs are like a deep man page and do not have simple use cases, like, create a pkg for a binary
or create a pkg for a binary with systemd
or how to distribute a pkg of .so
IMO if the .deb and .rpm maintainers invested some time in modernizing their official pages with lots of quick starts and guides it would bring a lot of developers to their side.
(And in this specific case they needed more than Linux support)