There have been several initiatives that sound vaguely like that, none of which actually worked out commercially. Principally Itanium. At the same time, there is no question that it's possible to gain a lot in performance if you're both willing and able to use a programming environment like CUDA.
It seems to me that the article never actually articulates an alternative in enough detail to take seriously. It doesn't seem to make any falsifiable claim.
In my view the most plausible explanation for why things in this area look the way they look was articulated in DJB's "The Death of Optimizing Compilers" talk. I'm not surprised that this ACM piece was written by somebody that works on optimizing compilers. Perhaps that shouldn't be relevant, but I can't help but suspect that it is.
But as we can see, this model could not keep up with performance improvements so much more complexity got implemented beneath the surface of the old model. The author’s point is to be aware of the mismatch here, and that perhaps we should stop believing the “lies” what C tells us.
I personally believe that we would be much better off with lower level instructions exposed to us, and putting the complexity in software. That way CPU vulnerabilities could be patched, and I believe we could create much better optimizations, and faster CPU design iterations.