I agree. Maybe I'm missing the point, but I loathe default stylings. Ugly grey buttons and annoying blue html links normalized across browsers are still ugly grey buttons and annoying blue html links.
As apposed to having to to declare a reset, and then re-declaring everything again.
He says this in the article too: "Approach 1: use normalize.css as a starting point for your own project’s base CSS, customising the values to match the design’s requirements."
The point of normalize is not to keep links blue, and buttons gray. They find the rendering discrepancies between browsers, fix them, and make it easy for you to change.