Still I agree the problem is devices are not getting update and it's not a problem of want as the article hints, but of can't, at least at the user level: Of course carriers and manufacturers hate having to support devices instead of selling new ones!
The problem that Google apologists/Android fanboys forget... is that deploying an Android update is a HUGE cost to manufacturers for customization, testing, and deployment.
Google ships endless new versions without any respect to this, and leaves most of the work, and the cost, on manufacturers, who already had thin margins to begin with. Especially on entry level phones, hardware costs have been a race to the bottom.
These people are afraid to point out that Google has created an OS that's hard to update universally, requires a custom deployment for each and every hardware model, and is shipped without working hardware support for most of the hardware using it or even a modicum of stability even on their own reference platforms.
if the linux kernel driver model wouldn't be so hostile to driver backward compatibility, it'd be trivial for soc provider to have a single device driver delivered with the soc and cut the certification costs by orders of magnitude.
this is something google could fix, btw, creating something like FUSE but for wireless chipset integration and keeping that backward compatible.
Manufacturers can get their drivers merged into the mainline kernel and they won't have a driver backward compatibility issue to worry about.
They choose not to for business reasons (market segmentation/artificial hardware limits via drivers) or because they are being cheap. And because much of the market doesn't know enough to care, it mostly works for them.
In the long run I think it limits the IoT ecosystem from progressing and it's a practice which must stop. If your hardware is not fully supported by the mainline kernel, it may as well not exist.
The argument isn't bad per se, it's just that reality disagrees.