People are still using the same screwdrivers and screws they used a hundred years ago. Phillips head isn't even that good - you can easily strip the head over a few uses, or even one, if you don't know what you're doing. There have been innovations in big machines (analogy parallel would be Hadoop or whatever). But at the small level, people are still using the basic hand implements they've always used because they always work, they work everywhere, everyone else knows them, and it's pretty hard to get the design for new ones wrong.

Like the author says, his ideas don't mean you should use Smalltalk or Lisp. Just that you should demand features, like how it took until Rust for sum types to escape functional. But the reason you shouldn't use Smalltalk is also the reason why languages like Smalltalk aren't going to get made: because when you're making a general-purpose language, it is extraordinarily hard to paradigmatically improve on what came before, and it's very easy to just get it all wrong and make a pile of trash that makes developers at the few companies that adopt it mad at you. Even Rust is not that amazing in this regard; its wild and new data model is in fact the exact same one you were supposed to be using in C++, just minus the ability to refuse.

Everyone smart who was able to make these things has been snapped up by big data where their talents produce the most direct value.