I don't see any dumb questions on your part. Maybe some differences of opinion. Don't ask me about the downvotes. I personally only downvote stuff that's deeply counterproductive. But it seems other people are more twitchy with them.
Anyway, I take the post as just saying that internationalization is bad for shell commands, not necessarily for other things.
Shell commands are unusual in that they are both a programming interface and a human interface. That puts strange constraints on them that don't show up elsewhere. For things that are clearly just a human interface (for example, a GUI app) you definitely want to localize. For things that are clearly just a computer interface (for example, a REST API) you definitely don't want to. But how do you deal with something like this where it's half and half? Trying to optimize for one use case can hurt the other, which is what this post is trying to show.