The author, w/o explicitly mentioning it anywhere, is explicitly talking about distributed systems where you’ve got plenty of resources, stable network connectivity and a log/trace ingestion solution (like Sumo or Datadog) alongside your setup.

That is the very core of my objection. He hasn't identified the warrants for his argument, meaning his argument is literally gibberish to people working from a different set of warrants. Dudebro here could learn a thing or two from Toulmin.

This is a problem endemic to techbros writing about tech. They assume, quite incorrectly, that the entire world is just clones of themselves perhaps a little bit behind on the learning curve. (It never occurs, naturally, that others might be ahead of them on the learning curve or *gasp!* that there may be more than one curve! That would be silly!)

So they write without establishing their warrants. (Hell, they often write without bothering to define their terms, because "trace" means the same thing in all forms of computer technology, amirite?!) They write as if they have The Answer instead of merely a possible answer in a limited set of circumstance (which they fail to identify). And they write as if they're on the top of the learning heap instead of, as is statistically far more likely, somewhere in the middle.

Which makes it funny when he sings the praises of a tracing library that, when I investigated it briefly, made me choke with laughter at just how painfully ineffective it is compared to tools I've used in the past; specifically Erlang's tracing tools. The library he's text-wanking to is pitifully weak compared to what comes out of the box in an Erlang environment. You have to manually insert tracing calls (error-prone, tedious, obfuscatory) for example. Whatever you don't decide to trace in advance can't be traced. Whereas Erlang's tracing system (and, presumably Ruby-on-BEAM's, a.k.a. Elixir) lets you make ad hoc tracing calls on live systems as they're executing. This means you can trace a live system as it's fucking up without having to be a precognitive psychic when coding, leaving the costs of tracing at 0 until such a time as you genuinely need them.

So he doesn't identify his warrants, he writes as if he has the One True Answer, he assumes all programming forms use the same jargon in the same way, and he acts as if he's the guru sharing his wisdom when he's actually way behind the curve on the very tech he's pitching.

He is a, in a word, programmer.