Interesting, I'm glad to see people have positive experiences with Hackathons despite my own being horribly toxic. The reasoning given in the article is actually the impetus behind my decision to ditch hackathons (and later the "development" community in favor of QA Automation).
The 'competition' portion of a hackathon usually messes me up in both approach to the work and the desired end goal. Whereas it seems to be a major portion of the attraction for the blog author and a lot of people in this thread.
Perhaps it is a matter of teammates that I have participated with thus far, but trying to hack together a minimum-passable-product (note: not even viable but ~passable~) stuck me as an utter waste.