I read it as being about the incompetence of reviewers. Considering the dreck that does get published, rejecting Nobel-level work should be an enduring disgrace.

Edit: had forgotten about submission fees. Yes, those were real. $100 was a lot more then, particularly for a grad student. Competion from open-access journals has been so good that people are forgetting how terrible it was. But paywall journals are still very, very bad. IMO it is irresponsible to use one.