It's definitely not poorly thought out article. People want to automate away the boring parts of their work and life but, as the meme says, people want AI to do their dishes and laundry so they can do writing and art but instead AI does their writing and art so they can do the laundry.
I'm not sure what you think the straw man is here. I think he already addresses this in the article: "I’m not saying regular people don’t use Excel or Airtable to plan their weddings or have fun throwing PowerPoint parties, or even that AI won’t be useful to regular people over time [...] Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and shouldn’t be."
What do you mean?
Contrast this to when I am tasked with creating a report that they need. They're amazed. Absolutely amazed that I can write something coherent. I can only assume that with the Peter Principle, they're all surrounded by idiots who write emails and reports like Epstein.
mm, the fact that you disagree with the article doesn't make it poorly written.
In my experience no, there are significant limits to how much automation the average person wants in their life. Even if automating something would save time, doing so could be undesirable due to other metrics such as correctness, cost, latency, flexibility, or cognitive load.
> The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")
In context, what you've quoted there is not the creation of a strawman. In fact you yourself seem to have constructed a strawman out of the article.
(I have a strong case of software brain as he describes it myself.)