But...it's not their fault. Asking anyone to precisely describe a complex system that is subject to change will have the same problem(s).
This is why Agile[0] was such a breath of fresh air. And Iterative Prototyping, MVP's, all that. It's massively easier and quicker to slap something together, put it in front of a customer and ask them what's wrong with it, than it is to ask them what they want in the first place.
In my experience a quick "it should do this" is good enough to get that going, and then iterate from there.
[0]Actual Agile. As in the Manifesto. Not this Scrum bullshit.
Yes. In the same breath someone might denigrate users for not knowing what they want and also explain about how they can't accurately timeline their personal coding project where they are the only user and developer.
Designing any complex system is hard. Asking users to take part in that design process means asking them to do something hard (or at least that's hard if done well, and hard to tell you aren't doing well unless you put in that effort you didn't know you had to). Complaining about bad user requirements as fine, but truthfully it should be done in a way that's self deprecating...
I've logged in just to point out this fact, and to call out how the author of this anti-user stories rant is completely clueless and out of touch with the reality of developing software.
The whole point of user stories is to not only specify an objective target but also a concrete definition of done, in spite of the clients' inherent ambiguity and flexibility, and very often also contradicting notions inherent to their asks.
User stories report intent and context along with the goal. User stories adds information that helps developers help the customer. If you remove the out-of-band information, you are creating a process that is a throwback to the bad old days of waterfall, where saying that it's the client's fault that the devs built the exact opposite of what the clients were expecting.
All which was old is eventually new again, and in the case of "linear method" the novelty is not having a clue of what you need to do to meet customer's demands and expectations.