But the brief section on SQL is just weird. It's so completely awful that some people invented a shitty way to not use it? That's the argument? Huh. Command Lines must be completely awful because someone invented a mouse and some pictures, and those are a shitty way to not use command lines.
[0]: http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
But to be serious, it's not the language that's the barrier. It's the concept of sets and set computation that's different from the more normal things. The language just happens to address the problem domain pretty well. What avoiding learning a smidge of SQL does is allow you to avoid learning to understand your data. And that's probably fine for a beginner. But the article wasn't really addressed to what's wrong with the web for beginners. It's about what's wrong with the web, period. And I don't think that SQL--as a langauge--is really a problem.
Even if you want it or not, PHP is part of the web, de facto or not.
It is not trivial to avoid all of Javascript's design flaws, and the bugs they create, all of the time. Pretending otherwise is like pretending that "serious" C programmers always free their memory and never dereference invalid pointers. Even if you can solve certain problems by always writing your comparisons backwards, there is a design flaw there that didn't strictly need to exist. C has at least the excuse that it's intentionally very low-level.
Whether you like them or not, whether their problems end up being worse, the huge number of layers and transpilers over Javascript (like Coffeescript and jQuery) have a following because of Javascript's enduring legacy of pain. But due to the politics of browsers (and not due to Javascript's supposedly perfect design) we seem to be permanently stuck with Javascript as the only real browser language.
And of course developers are not going affected by the flaws mentioned in the snippets, but they're present and not nice. Would you like to work on a desk that's always messy?