I think the article is a bit simplistic.

It's true that _often_ OLAP cubes are not needed. That's simply because the amount of data and the latency requirements are _often_ not too demanding.

Also, materialized views don't solve the major issue with OLAP cubes: the need of maintaining data pipelines.

I wonder if a solution to this problem could come from a different way of caching result sets: new queries that would produce a subset of a previously cached result could be run against the cached result itself. Of course this opens up a new set of problems, cache invalidation etc..