"Focus on problems, not solutions" is pretty standard practice. Seems like author cherry picks some abstract concept of "bigco" and their process-driven planning. I guess.

Came here to say, I don't deny those anecdotes, but just as many companies can and do intuit "what problem are we solving?" and then come up with some potential solutions in meetings across stakeholders. That's called planning. Time-box it and move on to some face-reality testing.

Planning anything, in any way, is imperfect. Partly fed by over-pontificating about the perfect way to plan!