The author is exactly right. Indeed I work for government and we're buying into databricks and the people responsible for that don't even know what Spark is. The pitch which sold them the product is the one the author basically identified, infinitely scalable storage that is queryable, even though there are plenty of other products that offer that.
While government is an extreme example, I'm sure there's a lot of non-tech companies in a similar position. The people doing the procurement don't know anything about tech, but they do know that there's random databases all over the place that are a constant headache and they want to centralise everything in a single platform. Secondly they steadfastly refuse to hire competent tech people, if databricks ends up being a very expensive replacement for an OPs team then that's a big winner for any organisation that is unable to, or refuses to, hire an OPs team but has lots of money to burn.