Yes, the whole article is sort of tone deaf: it's like they see a problem but not the actual problem. It's very typical of the whole thing: complaints without actually doing the painful work of restructuring things, because that would cause too much inconvenience for the people who have benefited.
So we have these discussions about pay and supply and demand, which is part of it, but not the nature of the positions themselves, the ponzi funding scheme underlying it, the status hierarchies, none of it. No one wants to cut or line-item justify indirect funds, or turn those postdocs into faculty positions.
The last place I was at this issue came up about being able to have grad students without funding: the argument was if you can't fund them off of grants you shouldn't have them. On the surface, this sounds great, pretty reasonable, until you realize that now you're incentivizing taking grad students to support grants, rather than as an end in itself. Basically you're incentivizing a permanent student culture, because the expected lifecycle of the researcher is maybe 30 years, whereas the student is expected to only be there maybe 5 in theory.
It's so hard for me to wrap my head around it it: the best analogy maybe really is a ponzi scheme. The desired product is the input. It's so broken in so many ways. It's like no one is actually paying for research, they're paying for attracting students, attracting the money to pay for the research, the trappings of research, etc. That actual useful research gets done is a convenient side effect.