This is an insulting piece. It's a poor hitjob by someone who doesn't really know what is going on, which is extra unfortunate because Swift has a bunch of problems. Some of them are actually adjacent to the claims here! But this is just unsubstantiative flamebait.

Swift is controlled by Apple, Inc. Nobody worth listening to is denying that. The steering committee is almost all Apple employees, most of the commits going in come from people who commute to Cupertino, and whatever the progress is on Windows or Arduino or whatever, it's clear that "first class" really means iOS. That's all true. Apple makes proposals, they seek some community input, and in the end they pick what they like and it ends up in the language.

But even with that said, the rest of this post is of low quality. Tim Cook and his MBA buddies didn't personally come in to ruin the language because the shareholders aren't making money. Chris Lattner is, whatever his contributions to the language previously, just a guy. He would probably try to put Swift on GPUs today if he had his way. It's not the first time he sold it out before. You've got to go beyond "omgz so many keywords so complicated!!1!!" and look deeply at the real sources of complexity. Swift has a powerful generics system that has worst-case behavior that really sucks. The discussion process has a bunch of busybodies that have nothing better to do than talk about names of things. Yes. These are real problems. It's funny when there are random hacks in the source code to support things that Apple is shipping. But that is how a large project works. You are more than welcome to laugh about it on Twitter but substantive criticism it is not. Which is a shame, because there is plenty of it go around.