The article itself is pretty bad and wishy-washy, but the idea of software approaching magic is definitely true unless we do something about it. And here I mean magic as in an effect caused by chanting some spell or drawing a specific magic circle without understanding the why behind each word or each line in the digil, to follow the analogy.
This talk describes the problem pretty well. The old programmers who can actually wrangle the computer at the lowest level are not the majority anymore, and universities and most common jobs (where you used to learn from your seniors) aren't teaching the fundamental knowledge of the field. Web developers and data scientists and machine learning developers are working with tools they don't understand in order to produce their work. Now, I'm not saying that what they do is bad, but that we're piling up layers over layers of stuff on top of our computers, and we can't peel away the layers because the guys who know what's behind the scenes are dying and/or not teaching what they know (or what they teach can only be done in-person because it's mostly tacit knowledge that can't be written down, so they have to mentor others and even if they wanted to do that they can only teach so few people).
I don't know what the solution is and the dominos are falling. We still have good programmers supporting the lower layers of scaffolding but for how long?
Anyway, we still have a lot of young programmers interested in the lower levels of development and there's a lot of open source code that you can read to learn how they did it. I'm still hopeful, but the industry is going the other way (because it's cheaper) and in the short term this isn't bad, so change won't happen there (just like how we keep polluting the environment because it's cheaper, and industries won't stop until the air is literally unbreathable or governments around the world impose heavy carbon taxes with fines that are a big percentage of yearly revenue rather than fixed files)