I think the author is missing the many orders of magnitude of the recent growth in computing power and corresponding drop in flash costs. Compilers and interpreters are often wasteful too, but the benefits were so great that we eventually embraced them and never looked back. As far as persistence goes, who is to say that flash memory in modern systems isn't just as permanent in the real world as their disk-based counterparts? There are many ways to lose data, and a corrupted database is just as corrupted on a disk as it is in flash.

I'd also add that it's bad form to ridicule the academics on whose shoulders your own career rests. Better to stick to the argument at hand rather than take things personally.