Rolling your own crypto is considered bad practice because there are countless battle proven open source alternatives. Where are the open source alternatives for aircraft route optimisation that the article could talk about instead? And it would be a totally different article if it was talking about how to use them. This is an article about using optimisation tools to target a specific problem. Aircraft routing is just the example.
What is the actual point then? The whole thing feels very out of touch with any underlying reality. The only thing the author reports to doing is downloading, installing and running some code? I agree with the criticism. It is a self congratulatory exercise that has no utility value whatsoever, a point driven home by the solicitation at the end. Like we should be dazzled by the analytic skills of someone who can't understand how his tooling knowledge should be congruent to a real domain to be at all relevant, let alone useful.