Where you end up is, largely, a by-product of the little choices you make with how you spend your time, and you should treat your time accordingly, but the article treats those decisions as descending a tree with limited depth, when, in reality, the tree keeps going well past where your career (and your life) end. I don't think any of us (in tech) end up in a place where we have no choices (as the author implies), I think we end up in a place where the ROI distribution of our choices becomes so unequal that making a different one stops being practical depending on your goals.

You can spend the last X years of your career doing performance art or spear-fishing if you don't care about returns.