I was thinking the same thing while reading, but the author does mention them at the end (together with the bee swarm plot or sina plot, which I think is the better version of a violin plot)

https://www.rhoworld.com/i-swarm-you-swarm-we-all-swarm-for-...

I use violin plots but a complication is that the shape depends upon the bandwidth hyperparameter of the kernel density estimator that is used inside. The plot can differ a lot for different bandwidth values.

Selection of the 'proper' bandwidth is a classic bias-variance tradeoff problem.

The author mentions those at the bottom of the article, but two problems highlighted still remain:

* There's another intermediary concept (kernel density estimation) between the audience and the data

* They're still likely to misrepresent tight groupings and discontinuities, which will be smoothed out