You can't really make an informed decision without knowing how much data they were moving. For it to be that expensive, you'd need to be moving a ludicrous amount of data, and you can always parse data down to the required fields before indexing, which saves on licensing costs.
Windows needs sysadmins too, and Mac does as well. There are group policies and all sorts of other tools out there for managing Macs. Apple even has documentation on this.
Someone who is running a newer Linux desktop distro is not going to need sysadmin experience to web browse and read email. The same way someone using Windows or a Mac for a desktop distro isn't going to need sysadmin experience, either.
As for your websites, no one is going to build a simple website that needs a dedicated database server, a "memory cache server", or whatever. Those issues become relevant with scale.
This seems a bit generalized. Yes, infrastructure as code/etc. are becoming more prevalent, but underneath there are still systems running.
While a lot of jobs can abstract away these things, they are still there, and very real. If more people had an understanding of the underlying operating systems and file systems we could mitigate a lot of vulnerabilities, or find performance issues that may otherwise be obstructed, or a myriad of other things.
Hacker News is in a bit of a bubble in that the answer to everything seems to be "kubernetes" or "$newHotSolution". I think part of it is that a lot of developers haven't actually worked with machines. At one point in time there was a post here about how hard it is to set up a LAMP stack, a task you could hand a first year sysadmin and they should be able to figure it out. Abstraction and automation are nice, but the underlying concepts are still important.
Agreed, about 99% of admins I know would not be able to identify this error, and most likely most Hacker News reads. The last sentence on your post is very true.
Running a server to do database, authentication, comments, etc. is relatively simple. If you're trying to do scaling or whatever, sure. But to do all of that on a single vanilla server is pretty trivial, especially if you're using a CMS or some other software on it.
There is nothing in their terms of service or privacy policy that says personal information can't be used for an ongoing investigation.. just that it can't be used by "the Community". They even say that they collect personal information when submitting. When it is shared with the Community at large, it is assigned a non-personal identifier.
Just don't follow toxic sources, that's all he's advocating. If someone's sharing memes from a crazy political page, either block that page or remove the friend.
People say social media like Facebook is toxic for the most part because they only deal with toxic people.