I agree with the author in fact I host my web site using CGI with zero issues. From people who discredits CGI I would like to see, in addition to personal opinions, a clear proof of the fact that it is not suitable for production in professional web sites expecially low traffic ones.
Totally agreed: proper thinking (not hard thinking but proper) on how to design programs makes most debuggers tools useless. Kernighan and Pike, but also Thompson, Ritchie, etc. perfectly understood this 20 years ago. I would not be surprised to learn that they never had the needs to use something like gdb in their nontrivial C programs.
I think JavaScript is a special case because it's too much complex by design.