"Good luck using a better ad platform with no users to target your ads to".
The real alternative is simply not playing their game which is essentially an arms race with other advertisers anyway.
That might be true for huge advertisers trying to reach mass-market audiences.
For smaller businesses operating in niche markets, it is plausible that you can get better returns through other promotional channels that appeal directly to those markets, without needing all the nasty tracking or dubiously effective targeting that come with the likes of Facebook and Google. The idea that you "have to" advertise on the big, generic networks because that's "where all your potential customers are" is well out of date, at least in our experience.
Things are going well so inefficiency is fine (and it really may be fine), instead of fixing problems the best people are looking for new sources of growth.
They want to "get things done quickly" and inevitably break code elsewhere on the platform. The guy in the article is right - there's no other platform around where these sort of issues appear so often.
Which, in the case of the article, is exactly what happened.