Even if Google isn't penalising you for that today, they may well tomorrow. So using nofollow seems like quite a rational thing to do for any individual site as there isn't any downside as far as I know, only potential benefits.
Additionally, manually disavowing links hardly seems like a scalable solution. As somebody with a small website that I spend very little time maintaining, I don't want to have to regularly be checking some Google console for 'bad links'that I have to manually disavow to prevent getting delisted.
Breaking internet connectivity is a downside for society as a whole.
That's because previously webmasters we going around trying to get links to their sites added because it might get them rewarded by Google.
Google is trying to prevent the aberrant behaviour that the success of Pagerank caused in the structure of the Web, unfortunately there can be some collateral damage.
So what? Why should I have to care that Jeremy Palmer (or any other person) is linking to my site?
The point of the article is that webmasters are going around trying to get links to their sites removed because it might get them penalised by Google. That is not natural or desirable behaviour. Site owners shouldn't have to care about that. Many have resorted to adding 'nofollow' to all of their own outbound links for fear of being punished by Google for linking to 'spammy' sites and appearing to be part of a paid/circular links scheme.
It all sounds very broken to me.
Note: I have no interest in SEO whatsoever, and I only have a single low traffic web site.