That's a compelling article and I think I'm going to be a lot more cautious about using pie charts in the future, but the thin-doughnut design they're using here looks OK to me.

When you're summarizing coarse relative size across arbitrary categories, bar charts and tables give your selection of categories too much weight: everyone looks at the biggest bar or the biggest number and it's really hard to measure a long tail distribution visually.

If the message you're trying to send is, "nothing but X and Y matter, everything else combined is tiny", I still can't imagine a better visualization than a pie (or a doughnut).