That is exactly what I got from reading this article. Their staging process was poorly set up and they simply abandoned ship. Additionally, I was getting poor software culture vibes.
Similarly, "Poor ownership of changes" and "People mistakenly let process replace accountability" just don't seem staging-related to me. I've been in environments where people throw code over the fence straight into production.
The other issue that is fair is the potential lag between dev and production if you have a gate at staging. This way, a developer is likely to move onto something else instead of watching their baby swim into production with all the errors that could cause!
(Not to say that testing on a developer's machine wouldn't have these same problems, of course, which I also find the article glosses over.)