I mean that's mostly true in theory - and we're assuming good faith from the author of the blog that they were honest and clear in their communications of course (definitely strongly agree with you on that point). But that's still a very optimistic view of the power dynamic. It's generally not meaningful to say that someone technically has the power to do xyz (rejecting a timeline) because nothing literally physically stops them from doing it when there are severe consequences (getting fired) that come from it.

Also, > tell them it's their responsibility if it fails, so they can't blame it on you when it does fail.

That's definitely not how any of this works. They can absolutely blame whoever they want and often have the power dynamic in place to get away with it. Especially in this case where they'll just say the author was given a senior title and a raise so it's on them to deliver and their attempts to shift the blame to management won't work to cover up the engineers failure to deliver etc. You just have no leverage as an engineer joining a company that doesn't care or doesn't need devs to the extent they go extended periods of time without a single one. And if you don't build that leverage within the company you pretty much have no option but to go somewhere else if put in a bad situation.