The author isn't criticizing so much as observing. From TFA:
The post is not about the Agnostic or his code, it’s about the dynamic of programmers eager to rewrite code in their own image, and the hypothesis that our (I am equally guilty of this behaviour) motivation for doing so is to emphasize the small differences between ourselves and others.
I love how people missing the point actually reinforces the point. Well done.
2. I think you complicated your point by having the other programmers rewrite it incorrectly.
I realize the context of your article requires a coding example that is somewhat trivial to understand and pick apart by developers who have a "better way", but I also think it's a copout to claim that the programmers in your example are just refactoring code for the fun of it.
A lot of people are rightly fixating on the formatting "feature" of not padding 2-digit zip codes. If I was on that project I could easily see myself wanting to reuse the zip-code formatter and running into an issue where my use case requires the 2-digit zip codes to get padded.
On most projects a zip-code formatter shouldn't be such a big deal that it requires a meeting between programmers. If the original zip-code formatter had bizarro requirements then they should be made more explicit.
For some reason the article avoids the biggest mistake in the whole process. Why did the other programmers make changes without ensuring the test cases passed?
Sure, we could say there should be more tests, or people should run them. We can say there should be issues filed before you refactor things. We can try to introduce all sorts of processes for avoiding mistakes. And we'd be right.
But it's also nice to talk to a human, even if just casually. I don't want to say "shouldn't X without Y" because then "shouldn't make changes to other's code without talking to them" is much the same thing as "shouldn't make changes without running existing tests" and "shouldn't check changes in without submitting tests that the code fixes."
Shoulds and shouldn'ts should always be secondary to talking.
Talking to the person who wrote the code you want to change is always a good idea. It's not always possible (because the original coder has left the company or something), but if you have the opportunity, use it. You'll learn something.
I do this all the time. Sometimes the answer is: "You're probably right. Change it." and sometimes it's "It's like that because of good reasons X and Y, and we also use this in another project that needs it to do Z." This understanding is very valuable, and can save you a lot of time.