The article is mostly about the power of a lisp dialect. It's kind of "in the tradition" of lisp to write about it in glowing terms. I myself was inspired to learn a lisp after reading several of these types of essays.
It's just that there's a lot of empirical evidence that these grandiose praise is just praise, but not a lot of shipped software, compared to the 'worse is better' languages such as php, javascript or c.
However, this might be due to the fact that in order to write something in lisp, the author has to be pretty clever, but in order to crap out something in php, you don't need very much cleverness and just need grit/effort. And there are many more people who are not clever, but has grit and effort.
Quantity of "shipped software" depends on many factors. Quality of the language is pretty far down the list. Take Javascript. It's usage numbers might have something to do with it being available in every browser on the planet.
but clojurescript is available, so if clojure is truly as superior as javascript, it would make a lot of sense to use this. And indeed there are apps that do, but overwhelmingly more apps just use plain javascript. But when typescript came along, a lot of people switched to it. So it cannot be just merely compiler/build friction imho.