While the reasoning holds generally, that specific example is wrong.
The type the author presents is not the “User Profile” but a “User Profile Load Resource” (or something in those terms).
When you actually design interfaces you discover that there are way more states to keep in mind when implementing asynchronous loading.
1. There’s an initial state, where fetching has not happened yet
2. There may be initial cached (stale or not) data
3. Once loaded the data could be revalidated / refreshed
So the assumption that you either are loading XOR have data XOR have an error does not hold. You could have data, an error from the last revalidation, and be loading (revalidating).
If they are "front and center" they should be covered by your front page, probably also centered :P
Anyway I'm intrigued, but being it closed source means there's a huge "NO" for me written on top of it. Even if it's source code included (as in "we give code snapshots to customers") this means it is not the kind of project I would bet on.
As dev AND ux designer I ask you to, please, not to forget that most of decision makers have been in a situation where they had to throw away a medium to big system whose UX was blatantly old and poorly executed because it was on top of something similar to Alan. (This is just 4GL again)