(author of the article)
100% agree. As others have said, a good graphics programmer works with tech artists and artists. Frankly, graphics programming is largely a role of service to enable those people to do what they want to do, or help create what they envision.
People mentioned Inigo Quilez as an example of a graphics programmer who is also an artist. He is a power house and a unicorn.
I personally like playing music / programming audio more, which is a good ground for learning DSP things - useful when for instance, you want to push your rendering noise into the high frequencies, so a low pass filter is more effective at denoising.
Yeah. Sampling bias is fixed with Cranley Patterson rotation.
For real time rendering, blue noise is the thing to use though. At low sample counts you can't converge so you should hide the error perceptually instead.
Game development tends to make code more in this style, half way between C and C++.
The reasoning of this is primarily the need to avoid hidden costs in the STL, but to be honest is also just momentum & culture :)