Regarding the article, I feel like there's some context missing, is this part of some ongoing debate about TCS? The piece abruptly ends.
One that comes to mind is the recent breakthroughs in AI which have caught theorists flat-footed. Sanjeev Arora and others openly admit we don't have a good theoretical understanding of the empirical successes of deep learning, how they are able to do the things they do with emergent phenomena, scaling effects, etc.
Scott Aaronson has also suggested that theoretical CS should be seen as analogous to theoretical physics.
On the other hand, I don't know if the argument could be abused to dismiss things like P vs NP as having no realistic scientific value. That would be the flip side of Vardi's argument. I do vaguely recall Aaronson in one of his blog posts or pdf essays* giving a more subtle argument about why P vs NP is central to computer science anyways, and I think that would be a slightly different position than either Vardi's or his reading of Widgerson's here.
*See the first several subsections about common Objections in pp 6-7 in: https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pnp.pdf