I have seen "worse is better" trotted out many many times, used mostly as an appeal to authority instead of a clear instantiation of the argument presented in the essay. I think this is because the argument in the original essay is not crisply presented (at least not to me). So authors take "worse" and "better" on some random dimension that's beneficial to them in the moment, and then appeal to the authority of this well respected essay to "prove" that their approach is better.

This post is stating that they tried to generalize too much instead of building to narrow use cases first. There is no need to bring "worse is better" into it at all, IMO