I like that the article is attempting to encourage people to cook more, but the premise is flawed. You don't take someone who's interested in food and tell them to read the French Laundry Cookbook. You tell them to start with Julia Child, or the Joy of Cooking, or Cooks Illustrated, or Mark Bittman. Crawl, then walk, then run.

Similarly, you don't tell a novice to spend $1000 on equipment they might never use. I've cooked "gourmet" for over a decade and I've never owned a stand mixer. You tell them to buy a good chef's knife, a good paring knife. A stock pot, a frying pan, maybe a saucepan. I have a cast iron pan but i use my nonstick pans much more often.

The difficulty in learning to cook is not in getting the right tools. It's in getting someone to overcome their fear of it. You just need to show them that it's actually not a difficult thing, that you can screw up a recipe multiple times and still have a delicious result. Make a pot of spaghetti, then a simple soup or stew, roast a chicken, fry a steak. Then go nuts making Keller's Oysters and Pearls. But only after.

The people who would find use out of many of the items listed are the same people who know what they need, anyway.