I agree that Fermi isn't a paradox but if the chance of an advanced civilization on a given star is independent from the chance of one on another, then the components of Drake's equation exist and to have the chance be small, the components must be small, for suitable definition of small.

The article and blog's meta-argument involves choosing components over a random distribution of universes and saying "well, there's a good chance you wind-up in a universe with small". But reasoning about random universes is debatable, introducing unnecessary metaphysics but even so, if you wind-up in a universe with a small chance of an advanced civilization, you will wind-up in a universe with Drake's components also small. Which is to say the whole reasoning does nothing but "muddy the waters".

The only way the "randomly chosen universe" argument matters is if we're jumping from universe to universe or if there's a force that inherently keeps us from reasoning about the why of the Drake components - but neither of those conditions are met.