Debian is my preferred distribution for servers, I'm simply in awe of what the community has achieved. Most of the good features that people associate with Ubuntu are actually in Debian, with none of the proprietary weirdness that creeps into Ubuntu year over year.
The project does, however, sometimes have its share of people who dogmatic/pedantic to the point where it really doesn't help the cause. This might be expected from something that's a passion project for many of its contributors, and to Debian's credit, they've always been able to resolve these conflicts eventually.
The article mentions the systemd drama. The recent kerfuffle around the 'which' command might be a smaller example of this kind of thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026623 And note: As silly as that discussion was, when it got widespread attention, it was actually already resolved.