> My argument would be: whether firewalls are "stupid crap" or not, they certainly do seem to matter right now.

Which would be the hard nut of the matter. Just as security guards at a checkpoint to a military base provide some value in at least awareness of a threat. But if we take the article at face value then we have to believe that the role of the firewall will become greatly diminished to something more sentry like rather than something that aspires to be a portcullis. And while the ability of the gateway infrastructure to prevent an attack from occurring arrives it may be able to raise the cost of mounting an attack by the network equivalent of ASLR on the stack by intentionally re-routing some parts of the network connect to avoid things like bogus source routing, or confusing CBC ciphers in private protocols.