It will always be possible to accuse an article or even a book of being light on details. It is after all some pointers and not a scheme to make a non-technical manager technical. Learning anything takes more than reading at surface level, particularly of a clearly introductory article. The principle of charity goes a long way to smoothing out the inner pedant.
Certainly true, and I do think people skipped the section on refactoring. But I guess my real complaint here is that the article itself seems to advocate against the principle of charity!
Asserting that generic versions and frameworks are inherently 'red flags' that someone doesn't know how to do their job doesn't seem like an inducement to more reading, it seems like a misleading absolute. I got that feeling throughout the whole piece, for instance with the implication that memory limits are key in all tasks.
It was either very domain-specific advice (I know the author came out of game design, which fits his list better than general software), or vastly overstated advice.
I don't think they're being introduced as red flags to say "call bullshit on this and don't do it" but to be aware in the following cost-benefit analysis.
I don't doubt that the author is good at this job, but I think we're seeing an 'unconscious competence' issue. If I say "Java is platform-independent while C++ isn't", the author probably knows enough to think "well, that's a factual statement, not a red flag". But the person reading the checklist he wrote probably doesn't.
Honestly, I got some value out of this article as a list of things to ask myself. But it seems to be aimed at exactly the people who won't be able to interpret it effectively, and will misapply the hard-and-fast rules here.