I don’t agree. My perception is that the author doesn’t think “atmosphere” discussions about programming languages are of less value, it’s just an example to segue into the classification of “soil, surface, and atmosphere” as types of programming language considerations, and off of that the observation that the past decade has shifted significantly to “atmosphere” as the most important aspect for safe, boring software engineering (which is the actual primary topic of the article)

None of that is to imply the friend is wrong or inferior in some way