> “make everything verbose, even when it’s already unambiguous”

The idea is to make the language less context-sensitive and more consistent. It's better if the meaning of `<p>` and `<p/>` don't change based on the parent tag. Now, obviously they failed at making the semantic changes necessary to achieve the goal, but a true XML-based language would've been far simpler both for humans and computers than what we've got now. Most of the author's points are entirely valid, but the conclusion really should've been "HTML is bad."