The author appears to conflate feature-bloat with "rich" web UI platforms. This doesn't have to be the case.

When I'm making something using Flash, AJAX, scripted SVG, or <canvas>, I like to think in terms of which UI elements can be simplified or eliminated by having a more expressive interface.

For example, AJAXified controls can eliminate the need for a "save" button in some forms, drag-and-drop can simplify moving and reordering operations, scripted SVG can bring sanity to working with tree-structured data, AJAX polling or Comet streaming can eliminate UI actions like page reload or manually checking for updates, etc.