Translation: it's for people who (you think) want pretty plots instead of an actual understanding of the data. The article's repudiation of "mullah" (?!) opinion is a little anti-intellectual IMO - these people tend to have a lot of experience and therefore understand common pitfalls better than a lay person's intuition.
Pie charts do not work as intended in general, but may work in specific cases like the one the article shows. Pie charts have low perceived precision because people are bad at estimating radial distances. If in the article's example potatoes were 60 and rice 58, the pie chart would not convey that rice is lower than potatoes - they would look the same. A bar chart or stacked chart does not lose this information because humans perceive location with very high precision. There are several other pie chart failure scenarios, like too many categories, or very imbalanced categories, or very balanced categories. Overall, it's a very non-robust visualization method. It may look good in your presentation now, but when you get updated numbers you may find it becomes a mess.