Fantastic nugget of wisdom here. Saying that you want a product to be "intuitive" or "simple" is as useful as saying that you want it to be "good, not bad."
These are all things that affect whether a product could be perceived as good vs. bad.
Importantly, intuitiveness is not relevant for some products, or not what makes it good or bad. The tradeoffs between other aspects of your product could be such that trying to achieve intuitiveness would actively reduce value.
Identifying intuitiveness as something you can optimize for or not is not pointless. I'd also argue that intuitiveness can be measured and strategies for more intuitive designs/patterns can be formed.
Yes, and it is actually useful to say "I need this product to be inexpensive", rather than "I want this product to be good."
That's what the author is getting at. Just saying "I want the product to be intuitive and simple" is worthless. You have to actually define what that means and what properties the product has to be considered "intuitive". But too often, "I want it to be intuitive" is about as far as they get.