Even large companies with thousands of developers have budgets to manage and often times when the CT/IO sees free as an option that's all that matters.
Been using both 1.x and 2.x for telemetry (oss & paid both). I am pretty excited with 3.x's interoperability. Archiving to standard data formats makes the data science team's job's easier, and with a more standard ANSI SQL query engine with jdbc support, and high cardinality tags, it will greatly speed up front end development and analysis use cases.
As well, I am one of those folks that happens to find the Flux query language powerful, but it's not easy enough for folks to just make that jump from SQL. Flux is much closer to Splunk's search language. It is good at what it does. FluxQL doesn't even have date parsing (which is really odd for a time series query language), but FlightSQL in 3.x seems to be more complete.
Since this was published in 2014 it gives us some space to compare the article's predictions to reality. While Google has certainly been found liable for having violated some privacy laws there is no evidence of widespread and intentional misuse of personal data at Google. The bigger concern for me personally is the Amazon/Walmart dominance of purchasing data.