Perhaps MS word was worse 10 years ago. I think there is only one argument in the article that has stayed relevant, which is that word is a big complicated crash-prone program, whereas it's preferable to have a lightweight text editor. There are three possible required levels of expertise, depending on how important having a properly typeset document is: (1) using word (2) understanding TeX (3) understanding word.

If your document can be ugly, you can just open word and get cracking. The occasional weird formatting problems that show up in word aren't a huge deal. But if having a proper document is important, you need to either actually know latex or actually know word. Knowing latex is way easier than knowing how word works. MS made word easy to use by hiding all the gears. This is a problem when the gears don't work how you need them to (which sadly still happens too often).

The number of people for whom formatting matters this much is probably limited to publishers and academics, so I guess it probably doesn't matter much in general.