Exactly, I don't really see the problem in the article. I have a $40/year (15GB) account and apart from my fastmail and my forwarded pobox.com address, I also receive mail for and host DNS records and web pages for 2 other virtual domains. Also, I'm very happy with spam filtering and Fastmail's service quality (they even post on Twitter things like 'mail is slow currently, investigating...').

Not to mention a federation-friendly XMPP server that supports external domains via SRV records. For this and the features you list, I've also been a very happy FastMail user for the past few years and could never return to the walled garden that is Google.

Well, I can't say I'm happy with spam filtering - I regularly get some stupid spam to the inbox (not even something smart enough to bypass the filters, IMO).

I'm at a point with Gmail where I'd be happy that I'm getting a bit of spam in the inbox. Unfortunately I'm starting to see a lot of false positives recently. I was actually looking to move out of Gmail myself

I get some spam too (which passes both pobox.com's and fastmail's filtering), but it's much less than I previously had with gmail and I assume that spam has become more elaborate these days. Also, with gmail I had more false positives.

"that I use for e-mail for myself and a few other family members."

If the domain is dedicated to yourself, there's no problem as you can indeed add an unlimited amount of domains, forwards and aliases. Sharing one account with 4 family members isn't very convenient though.

I’m doing the same thing very happily. The upside is that you can have email addresses that you may rarely use, but still prefer to have, without having to pay separately for them too.

FastMail’s “personalities” make it possible to do this very easily. Almost all the mail clients have decent support for this too. (I use Mail.app on Mac and Dispatch on iPhone.)