And the author mentioned how it has negative consequences when there is in fact an actual difference that the clients are not able to distinguish between. Some self-policing on the part of the people who can would help a lot with that.

Are you referring to that bulleted list of problems that he claims impact the "entire industry"?

Because that list sounded more like negative consequences to the author's business, not an entire industry. If he were truly succeeding as a services company focused on the Wordpress niche, those would be pain points toward which he would focus his own marketing, and they would be business opportunities, not global problems with people's titles.

Other than the bulleted list I linked a few articles as well, including the problem with having to educate the customers. While education is always required, most of the "developers" underprice the market, sell unstable solutions and so on. A lot of enterprise customers avoid WordPress as being unreliable and hard to find a reliable team for, which leads to other problems.

We do have a decent business strategy that seems to be working and have some high-end clients (including banks, automotive manufacturers, SaaS providers), but our growth is somewhat constrained due to the limited opportunities thanks to the bad rap of the platform, hiring is incredibly challenging, selling to enterprises has an added overhead and so on. And yes, we can switch to another platform, but I do believe that a few actionable steps (like settings standards and simply separating site builders from developers) can solve many of those problems.