Interesting read, but ultimately I was left confused as to the purpose of the article. As far as I can tell it was to express the author's disdain for the modern web stack (an embarrassment for web devs, to be sure) and to advocate using vim (yawn).
Nevertheless Slack still manages to do it badly: Cmd+Shift+K takes 3 seconds to load the list of channels for a quick jump. How's that considered usable?
It's something I generally miss: the ability to do actions using the keyboard. I think IDEA did it relatively well: their double-shift "Search everywhere" window works both fast and literally searches everything, providing something quite familiar to the console.
I'd say in most cases it takes more time to learn a console application. GUI's these days are, mostly, pretty intuitive. CLI applications are not intuitive at all.
The difference is, for me, that GUI use quickly levels out in efficiency. _If_ I have learned the CLI commands and know them well, I generally can do tasks a whole lot quicker than a GUI I know well. It just has a higher up-front cost, which may be very worth it, to not worth it at all, depending on how much you use the application.
GUI programs can be intuitive too, but they also have their own special anti-intuitive things: meaningless icons, weird drag and drop paradigms, etc.
A multi-tabbed configuration would be the worst counter-example of the former. On the other hand mentioning IDEA again - their config window (Cmd+,) directly allows one to search for the elements of the configuration in a flat manner. That's damn efficient.
Have you ever tried to scroll through a list of 100s of items? What if all of these items are in pop-over menu that closes if you accidentally click outside it? How much easier that is in a console though.
I would always vouch for software that is both easy to use right from the start, but neither does not hide it's functionality anymore: just the way we have moved from yellow pages on the internet arranged in a tree-like fashion for a purely flat Google interface, I would like to be able to use software in the same non-hierarchical way.
It goes into way more than that.
If by "purpose" you mean "what I get out of this", then not much. It's a rant, not some tutorial.