People who write these articles will talk for an hour straight about their favorite window manager, why it should actually be called Gnu/Linux, or why it’s “free as in beer”.
These are mostly systems they've come up with themselves rather than UI researchers actually studying it. Research finds things like that keyboard shortcuts aren't actually faster than mousing, people just experience them as faster because they take more focus.
I’m fact I’m much more productive since I stopped tweaking my Emacs config and just thought before writing code.
At the end of the day, the purpose of some things is just to get out of your way.