One thing that is rarely mentioned, but usually practiced: Unix tools rarely modify its own state. The only way to modify the behaviour of a program is to pass parameters, set an environment variable, or modify a configuration file. This lends a great degree of predictability to how programs will behave. If you pipe something into grep, sed, awk, etc. you know how it will behave. It sounds like the article's author is not just ignoring that aspect of the Unix philosophy, but contradicting it.

I'm not exactly sure what the author is arguing for. Perhaps they have a vision, and perhaps it is a vision that has utility. That said, I do not see how their words fit into a modernized version of the Unix philosophy.