Article is spot-on about personas being misused. The author provides some good guidelines for getting them back on track, but I've had more luck simply abandoning the personas concept altogether.

Personas might be useful as a brainstorming session to identify pain points, product interaction context, and problems to be solved. However, once those key goals have been identified, why not simply abandon the persona concept for the rest of the process?

Focus on solving the problems you've identified, not appealing to 3-5 extremely specific imaginary personas.