Yes, the 4-armies analogy was a remarkable non-sequitur. I can't help but think he introduced it to talk about the hidden perils of "standard solutions" and "vendor lock-in", but then abandoned this idea when his conclusive paragraph brags about solving a problem with AWS Aurora (a cloud RDMS) and AWS DynamoDB (a cloud mongo-ish).

This trade-off between (apparent) simplicity and vendor lock-in is a fundamental force in the industry, and is worth talking more plainly about. (Another big area where this affects people is authentication - it's easier (for users) to use Google- and Facebook-backed OAuth, but what are the trade-offs involved? Does this increase my vulnerability in any way?)

I liked the idea behind this article, but it's definitely a missed opportunity. And yeah, as something of a web-minimalist myself the ridiculous page-weight was a rather ironic touch.