I'm not convinced every bit of frustrating UI is good "friction". The author mentions many old games, but to be honest, even as a retrogamer I find going back to some clunky UI decisions of old games so frustrating it impedes my enjoyment of those games.
I think some "friction" is indeed useful, and that the convenience of a modern UI is sometimes detrimental to the gameplay experience. To name another example, also from Lukas Pope (hey, fanboy here!) in "Return of the Obra Dinn", the player is an insurance inspector unravelling the mystery of a merchant ship that returned without crew. There is no way of teleporting between spots in the ship, even if it would be a modern and convenient UI: the author has said he wanted to recreate the feeling of walking inside a medium size ship, and teleporting would have destroyed that feeling.
However, the extreme of "sometimes the UI makes you misclick or doesn't respond accurately" would be frustrating for no good gameplay role. It seems the issue described in that twitter thread, of clicking on an item but it got sold so it got swapped with another one at the last second, and you end up buying the wrong one, is borderline frustrating for no good reason.
A player could accuse the author of being lazy, e.g. "you just didn't think this through and now you want to claim bugs are features", whereas the limited UI in a game like "Papers, Please!" -- like it or hate it -- is evidently intentional, and there's no mistaking that.
The first example that comes to my mind would be Witcher 2 and the use of potions. You are a bit squishy and the beneficial effects from potions are impactful. However, it is a bit of a slog to prepare and consume the potions before an encounter.
In contrast, Witcher 3 simplified the mechanic to such a degree that it might as well be Diablo where you are chugging potions mid-battle.
What other examples of "friction" are there in this game besides that some organs in your inventory may eat other organs? That's just a single example but I don't see anything else mentioned.
What's the difference between "friction" and just challenges in a game (or good old plain "difficulty"). I understand many casual click-and-wait games in the last decade essentially autoplay, and there's no way to lose: you just click, and wait (or expedite the wait by making a micropayment), and that's all there is to them. Has this become so much the norm that the concept of a game that can be difficult, or requires skill, or where you can lose, is surprising?
Are UI limitations themselves a sort of friction? That's a concept I can get behind: one of my absolute favorite games is "Papers, Please!", which effectively deploys cumbersome UI as a gameplay element. You are bureaucrat and most of your game area is your desktop, which is tiny, and you must shuffle papers and overlapping game elements in that limited space under stress and with a time limit -- and the experience is great, if frustrating. So if friction is this -- a conscious way to limit the player's interaction with the game, in ways that enhance and add challenge to the gameplay experience -- then I'm ok with the term!