I think the main point here is to avoid general catches and instead catch specific exceptions.

The author raises the interesting point that if it's truly an exception, you're better off letting the system crash all together (especially in a webapp, where you're basically dropping a single request for a single user) -- and if it's an "expected exception", then you should be handling it directly.

I don't see how that reduces to "never use try/catch" though, since catching a specific exception (or types of exceptions) is a way of "handling it directly."