You did not read the article completely, did you? For someone with wise father, you are not being wise yourself. The writer is exactly talking about this subjectivity.
I also find "the volta" unrelatable. I don't feel that every novel is boring at the beginning, nor do I experience boredom between the "portal" and the "volta". Some novels have parts I find boring, of course, but they can appear at any part of a book for me.
I guess that this phenomenon is more rooted in the way the author and her peer group read. Reading dozens or hundreds of novels a year, often for a professional purpose, is wholly different from me reading my one or two books a month. I guess, if I had to read a whole bunch of novels for my PhD, I would be bored more during reading.
Reading should not feel like wading through slop. Period. If it does, that is simply bad writing.
Too many people don't have the guts to simply say "No, I do not like that; there are better things I can read."