That's a highly unfair characterization of a thoughtful, carefully written piece on how too much of a good(?) thing—technology, statistics—can ruin the perceived value of human activities and products.

Well, it's talking about the pointlessness of optimising arbitrary measures of success so you could say that it is, indeed, about machine learning - the field of research and its core practice.

It is not pointless. These optimizations win games, which brings in more money. Professional baseball is a business like any other, so it should come as no surprise that it will be optimized like any other business.