I think this is a good observation of the breadth of knowledge required to actually boot up a site. You're right: twiddling .htaccess while complaining about WordPress complexity seems absurd since the former is such a lower level of abstraction. I wonder if this is just due to poor documentation of wordpress, but I googled how to create personal website and there are tens of thousands of personal website explaining how to set up a personal website. I'll go one step further and criticize: this write-up is too lightly researched IMHO: if it were a research paper I'd give it a D.