> Why should everyone else on earth have to suffer crappier performance by default because of the business/software practices of a select few?

The author states in the article that they believe this may be exploitable from javascript in a browser. Just to hammer the point home, any web page could steal anything in memory on your computer. Spectre was also browser-exploitable, and was mitigated there partly by making access to high precision timers privileged. This is very much not a problem that only impacts cloud providers.