Maybe you should have read the article. Maybe not expensive for a software developer making 6 figures a year, but that's not most people. For people living near poverty levels $1k a year is a lot of money.

I'll do the maths for the UK since I have numbers.

50 cents is about 0.70 GBP

UK minimum wage is 7.83 GBP per hour pre-tax.

So one nappy at that rate is 5.5 minutes of work. That's considerably longer than the time it takes to remove and clean.

The environmental factor is also pretty huge. Store a weeks worth of disposables separate and the amount of landfill over the course nappy period of a baby is insane!