The majority of users use web applications. The majority of web applications are not free software. You can conclude from this that the majority of users don't use free software.

The point of the article is to think more like the average user. They will trade off convenience at the cost of privacy and control if that is what it takes. However if you offer them convenience, privacy and control without a tradeoff by creating more free software for the web they are more likely to use free software.

What's the point of blabbering about vi and emacs then? Those are fundamentally local tools, why would one ever want to move those into a 'web application', whatever that means in the context of a text editor?

Yeah I'm not he ever said why adopting web technologies would be better, except by saying that using cli tools is fetishism. (But web technologies aren't I guess?)

sometimes the CLI is the correct tool for the job and its interesting that Microsoft is going down the cli route with powershell