Because it's not real intelligence and because lots of money and expertise are thrown at something that's not going to get us closer to AGI.

As a neo-luddite myself I'm personally fine with that (as I'm personally fine with us throwing money away at CERN), but there are people who still think that AGI is possible and who also think that reaching AGI is a worthy goal, so those people might not be ok with chasing windmills.

No actually he links to old research which is becoming relevant now. I mean the main beef in this article is that LeCun used to dismiss certain ideas and now he's presenting them as his own ideas. So there is value in revisiting old theoretical research and turning it into practical applications now that we finally have enough GPU power to do so.

He frequents HN so it's not totally out of the realm of possibility that he boosts his own posts.