Lisp is not, nor has it ever been, a functional programming language. It had lambda decades before other languages figured out it was a good idea, but it had set! for just as long.
It is also not a list based language, but a tree based one. The fundamental point of lisps is that you can manipulate the abstract syntax tree directly since it's pretty much the same thing as the parse tree.
>Deep Nesting is Rare
>The lisp's cons [...] works just fine when data structure used is simple. [...] vast majority of list usage is just simple flat list, sometimes 2 level of nesting [...] 3 levels of nesting is seldom used [...] Greater than 3 level is rarely seen. Systematic manipulation and exploitation of nested list, such as mapping to leafs, to particular level, transposition by permutation on level, or list structure pattern matching in today's functional langs, etc is hardly ever to be seen.
I guess the author has never used lisp to implement a DSL in lisp. Writing a lisp interpreted in lisp is the first real program you write if you take a lisp course at university and you need to handle arbitrarily nested expressions.
Real world usage also involves writing a specialist language to solve your problem for anything more complex than a utility script, e.g. Emacs is a text editing DSL implemented in elisp.