Yes good, callout, I edited the code to fix this mistake
> Does the class even need to declare -init?
You are basically making my point. Its totally normal engineer's reaction to look to erase this boilerplate by removing the dependency injection, or using a singleton. Overtime, those decisions make the codebase worse. In Swift, you simply don't have to make this tradeoff.
> if your main complaint is just the number of lines of code, that's not particularly interesting
Verbosity alone is a major problem - why would it be a good idea to use a language which takes more time to read and write to accomplish your goal? It's a disadvantage.
Another issue is a lack of expressiveness and a dumber type system. Stuff like union types and optionals all allow you to express your system in a more airtight way. The lack of these features leads to, you guessed it, more boilerplate in ObjC.
Ultimately, noone is arguing that you should rewrite your existing ObjC in Swift - if your code exists and works, leave it alone. But the article is arguing that Objective C is a "better" language for writing iOS apps, which doesn't make any sense for all the reasons above.