1) It's pretty clear then that you don't have much experience with planning at level beyond a few people if you've never heard the term KPI come up in software
Feels like this person completely missed the point of choose boring technology. The point isn't to never use anything new or exciting, the point is to save the excitement for your core value prop so that you're not wasting time e.g. debugging why your customer database keeps losing data instead of iterating on your actual product, where all the excitement is.
Just wish these articles would address the amount of content and utility we get in exchange for our data (instead of our money) and speak to the trade-off. Until we find a better way to financially support all of the things we consume on the web, I'm not sure I see anything changing.
2) Agile still comes with meetings