I think this is extremely fair. It's really hard to understand why anyone might want metaprogramming until you've tried programming without it (on something larger than the average intro-to-CS assignment). Having more libraries and resources is extremely useful from teaching to working in the real world.

Most of the points in the article are valid, and I especially agree that Racket or another Scheme should be taught at some point later on. Maybe even implementing a Scheme as a final course project or something like that (although that might not make sense outside a compilers class...)