Recent versions of Darktable include some amazingly powerful ways to deal with tone mapping, perceptual saturation, etc. that he implemented.
RT, being also based on dcraw, crashes too but much more rarely and typically only with certain setting combinations applied (for my M1 MBP noise reduction in Lab space seems to be the only remaining trigger with latest build). RT also allows you more control over certain pre-processing steps, like turning off debayering and additional debayering methods, which I couldn’t find in DT.
Sadly, neither app approaches LR or C1 in terms of stability required for most professional uses, but they do give invaluable for an enthusiast control over scene data interpretation.
This is, of course, quite tangential to the article, which deals with display-referred pixel data only.
If only! Take an over- or under-exposed photo and try to correct it in Lightroom and Darktable. Lightroom is able to recover far more detail from those regions than Darktable. No idea how, but it can. Everything else is far better in Darktable, but edit quality is all that really matters in the end.
What I like about Darktable is vastly superior color uniformity and handling, and its tone equalizer module that allows for visual zoning control; it replaces most 3rd party plugins for Photoshop. PS really feels more and more outdated at this point for the de facto most popular software for photo manipulation, since it doesn't include modern tools and you have to construct massive workarounds or buy additional plugins.
What I dislike about Darktable is lack of persistent masking; currently all masks are generated by previous modules in the pixelpipe, so going back in editing can alter the mask.