It's interesting that the author would associate "frames, tables, and other fancy features" with a lack of interesting content. I assume tables are included because they were widely misused at the time, not because tabular data wasn't interesting.
I have a button in my toolbar called "dammit" which strips away every iframe, embed, object, audio, and video from the page, multiple times per second. These are considered foundational elements in the web platform and yet, when they disappear, pages seem to magically collapse into something readable.