The article starts saying that Scala gives you lots of options while Clojure guides you to a certain style, but the Scala example takes the most complicated solution as if every programmer would solve it that way. He's contradicting himself.

Scala can solve it in a way quite similar to Clojure. The author is trying to hammer a point about Clojure which doesn't emerge from the example, as most Scala programmers can notice.

It would have been great if he had listed all the possible solutions and told us "Scala lets you solve it in all these very different ways without the language guiding you, Clojure guides you to the simpler solution". That's a fair point, and one Scala programmers will tend to agree with.