When you are young and healthy, it feels like your body has no real hard limits, and doesn't define the boundary of what is and what isn't possible. But at some point, through age or misfortune, you will learn that, no, sometimes your body tells you "no" and you must listen.
I think people are entitled to decide the contours and priorities of their own dreams. If snowboarding was the author's main goal in life and "snowboarding" for him was a loosely-defined enough dream to still feel satisfied by whatever accommodations his knees forced upon him, then, yes, he could probably still reach it. But not all dreams are created equal and we don't have infinite agency. We have to pick our battles and the author may feel that while this is a dream, it's not an important enough one to go through all of the risks or other accommodations needed to get there.
Or perhaps his dream is to snowboard in a certain way, and have a certain kind of experience that simply won't work with his knees the way they are. I saw a video once of a guy carrying his brother who had cerebral palsy through a race. It had always been the brother's dream to race and since his disability prevented it, that was how they accomplished it. I am absolutely thrilled that both brothers were able to have an experience that feels so meaningful to them.
But, for me, if my dream were to run a race, being carried wouldn't feel like accomplishing that dream. Maybe another dream, equally worthwhile. But if it's not my feet pounding the pavement, that's not my dream. Perhaps the author's dream is similarly inflexible.
Either way, after someone writes an article about learning how to accept the limitations that life places on it, it seems rude to me to just tell him he didn't want it bad enough.
The point is that you only have so much time, and you will never do all the things you want to do, and learning to deal with that fact is an important thing you have to do.