It is not a joke, just a very frustrated (clickbaity) hyperbole rant.

"My premise is that updates are a massive waste of time, most of the time. Obviously, someone will jump out and say that "Hey, if you don't update, your Windows XP installation will get added to a botnet in less than a week," and they'll also be right at the same time. "

So my understanding is, when compared to a academical, idealistic point of view, handling of updates is not optimal. Sure thing.

But in reality, you still must patch your WinXP system if you have no better alternative and the author likely agrees. And if you do have a shitty legacy java project that is still needed in production - you still have to patch it, if you have to use it in the wild.

> Here's a fair warning: this article is reductio ad absurdum,

literally the first sentence...

It is not a joke. Upgrading dependencies is a lot of work in many programming languages, many web frameworks, etc.

Windows xp works fine when airgapped.

In a more serious note: it is a rant