He wasn’t actually giving a blanket directive. The article was suggesting that you think about whether 98% is actually good in your use case by doing the math and thinking.
Can I imagine a venue kicking out 2% of their former clients on some criteria? Absolutely yes.
Kicking out 2% of website visitors may still be totally reasonable if the cost to serve them is meaningful, or if they are less than 2% of revenue.
His defense for 98% being bad is that some CSS thing people were arguing about only had 70% coverage on his website.
Our b2b dashboard didn't support Safari for a while at all and it was entirely not an issue because everyone had a simple workaround to just use Chrome and the dashboard wasn't really the main product.
The thing is that it is all context dependent. A lot of times 0.1% is nothing and can be ignored or pushed off. But sometimes that 0.1% is worth billions of dollars.
The point is that data means nothing without context and interpretation. If you're lazy in your analysis you are going to have lots of issues
I can't tell if this is in support of the article or not though.
Good thing that we've managed to keep everybody's expectations a hell of a lot lower for software quality then :)