Yeah, you have to read the piece as a kind of parable -- emphasizing the most extreme cases of what can go wrong when the manager says "I don't understand, we had this other guy who said it could be done in 10 minutes / 1 hour / 1 day" or whatever. (And who hasn't been through that drill, like, a thousand times?)

But as you said, knowing how and and when to negotiate between said extremes is exactly where the "art" lies.