Interesting, I came out of this article thinking the author is both sexist and a narcissist. Sexist, because she attributes the failings of the industry to the failings of the male gender. Narcissistic, because this whole article is written directly from her perspective, as if she just disregarded that other perspectives exist.
This is all fine, because it's her article and we can all do as we will, but I really cannot understand how you think this point is reasonably made.
I know someone who had a lesser but similar episode after taking shrooms for the first time. It was about a week of paranoid delusions (The Truman Show came up a few times). After he snapped out of it, he totally turned his life around; went from a very phlegmatic personality to totally type A, got his degree, and now owns several businesses. The human brain is just so complex.
That's a Stephenson problem. He loves the world building, the engineering problem solving, but gets stuffed when it's time to end the books; which given his writing style, is totally understandable. I don't want the books to end either!
Stepping aside all the hate one gets for being critical of a scientific theory (as we all should do, regardless of how well established it is), there is quite a bit of evidence that polar ice helps to regulate global temperature, seasonal extremes (both hot and cold), seasonal timings, and weather patterns. These are all things we rely on to feed the global population, and live in all the places we do.
As to your main question, I don't see the same conclusion from the data. "Relatively slow" to what? We do have a good understanding of how greenhouse gasses work, and the data for glacial loss is correlated with gas emissions very tightly. I should probably dive into the most up to date data rather than use nebulous words like "very" and "good", but my stance is built on quite a bit of research into it a decade ago while pursuing an Atmospheric Sciences degree, so unless there's been new information that completely changes our understanding, I'd say it still carries weight.
My first thought was, will this apply to basically all machinery? Because for about $2000 I can buy a mill kit that I can manufactur a complete firearm on.
Honestly, modern ML models are extraordinarily messy. They are inefficient, unreliable (when the goal is perfect reliability), often misused, mostly unexplainable, and very much a "throw the spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks" type of problem solving.
Kalman filters, and other similar digital filtering and prediction algorithms, are like scalpels compared to the broadsword of NNs and such. There are plenty of things that you can't or shouldn't use a kalman filter for, but for the tasks that it is suited for, you cannot do better with another solution. ML is mostly hand wavy bullshit, and DSP algorithms are like... doing real math, real engineering.
You should be carrying more than 5 lbs of emergency water on anything more than day camping... yes finding water is a skill, but one that is dependent on there being water nearby.
This is all fine, because it's her article and we can all do as we will, but I really cannot understand how you think this point is reasonably made.