Perhaps this is true in the field discussed in the essay, but in my field (a natural science) formatting is taken care of with latex stylesheets, so the effort of switching to another journal format usually amounts to changing a few lines. Of course there can be small details such as whether a given journal wants keywords, but dealing with such things doesn't take much time.

The problem of switching to another journal is also overplayed in the essay, at least in my field. I don't know of many people who "shop" for journals to accept their work. Usually you know the right journal, and if the paper is rejected you just give up on it. Perhaps this is discipline-specific, though. (The essay is restricted to biomedical fields.)

As a reviewer, I've never spent any time on journal rules. If the paper gets accepted, it's up to the technical editor to impose rules.

Most authors employ the proper latex stylesheets from the first rough draft. They also use section headings that fit the journal's conventions, and so forth.

I suppose it is possible that people in biomedical fields (are there any here on HN?) tend to submit to multiple journals before their work is accepted. But I sort of doubt that reviewers reject papers based on things like italics or citation formatting, so if folks are submitting to a lot of journals, maybe their work just isn't highly regarded by their peers.

Basically there is no issue here, at least in my field. It's an unconvincing essay, and not one that encouraged me to waste time looking up the original work.