I'm honestly really confused by this article, and would love if someone could clarify this for me (no pun intended). The author mentions that classical inheritance is to be avoided and prototypal inheritance is one of the language's best features. Then he goes on to state that the constructor pattern is also to be avoided and suggests that this is something people use in an attempt to use JS in an object-oriented way.

Correct, me if I'm wrong, but using the constructor pattern (and new) in Javascript is the only real way to create an object that has a prototypal link to the constructor function's prototype. So what does this have to do with classical inheritance?