Amen, like you mention there are a couple of hurdles to get around but the reproducibility far outweighs that cost. Before docker trying to get virtually anything running on a variety of machines was a total nightmare
Every company I’ve ever worked for, to setup a dev environment and get the product passing test suites has been days to weeks. And without the automation and standard operating environment, every release was filled with missing dependencies because developers only tested on their local precious system. A side benefit to moving to containers is not contaminating your own machine with libraries or even breaking it because of versioning or config issues.
Docker gets developers and production machines on the same page.
... I would never go back to bare metal development
Instead of reading this article as "docker containers are bad" (wrong), try reading it as "there are problems with docker containers that can be improved" (right).
Containers fix a large number of issues, and many of these fixes directly benefit developers. But the article is right to point out inefficiencies that docker introduces in developer workflows. Docker may be taking developers and ops three steps forward, but for some, it's also one step backwards.