I completely disagree with almost the entirety of the article. It’s all about prior experience building large things many times yourself, not using some framework or other external abstraction.

When you have done this many times you absolutely can design a large application without touching the code. This is part planning and risk analysis experience and part architecture experience. You absolutely need a lot of experience creating large applications multiple times and going through that organizational grind but prior experience in management and writing high level plans is extremely helpful.