Didn't have time to make it through the entire (long winded) article, but is it wrong to boil down his thinking to the simple idea that a benevolent, competent dictator is the best form of government? I ask as this seems like a very simplistic and obvious idea. The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead? History has shown that we have never discovered a system that did this reliably and I didn't see any indication that he had solved this problem. How do you ensure you get a Sun King and not.. something else.
he addresses this, you simply get airline pilots to pick them
The concern you're talking about is about the actual access to the data. My understanding of the article is that it's about how caching algorithms can abstract the concern of minimising retrieval cost.
So in some ways you're coming at it from opposite directions. You're talking about a prior of "disk by default" and saying that a good abstraction lets you insert cache layers above that, whereas for the author the base case is "manually managing the layers of storage".