They're talking about WordPress.com, not self-hosted WordPress. It's not a good comparison, in my opinion.
That makes the post even more meaningless since they don't even say what managed service they are using. It seems they are complaining about what some unnamed managed service is charging them and framing it as criticism of WordPress.
Where exactly in the article am I complaining about being charged for having someone manage my backend?
I've made sure to more explicitly motivate the intent of switching to Wordpress being to reduce custom code and on-going maintenance, in the article.