from cursory reading of the article I don’t see that author’s problems are specifically with Grafana in its best use case (metrics), but with other products from Grafana company, for which are a lot of alternatives.

Grafana dashboards itself (paired with VictoriaMetrics and occasionally Clickhouse) is one of the most pleasant web apps IMO. Especially when you don’t try to push the constraints of its display model, which are sometimes annoying but understandable.