The author is clueless. There's a lot of hype and a lot of people / products that aren't actually any good at ML (or exist as an academic venture without getting their hands dirty).

But when ML works--Uber forecasting demand, Instacart optimizing shopping paths, delivery service route dispatching, and an infinite number of other real-world use cases with double-digit process improvements--it's extraordinary.

Sales forecasting, fraud prediction, modern search, and more are all powered by ML, and throwing a few stones at bad business plans, bad marketing, or over-marketing doesn't change the fact that those things are bad precisely because they're not that good at actual machine learning.