Clojure is kinda unique. It minimizes vector of frustration by merely not allowing needless garbage. Commas are the whitespace - totally makes sense. No bullshit stuff like semicolons. How many precedence rules are there, for example in Javascript? Like 19. In Scala? 14. In Clojure? Zero. How many things in Javascript can be falsy? (evaluate to false) - Seven. In Clojure - only two. How many reserved words there in Javascript? 64! How many in Clojure? Zero. Yes, that's right: there are no reserved words in Clojure. Do you know how many rules are there in ESLint? A lot! In contrast, Clojure teams have to agree to a single styleguide rule - either they align things or indent them - and that's it.

Does that all make Clojure less powerful than other languages? It turns out it, actually that makes it a lot more fun to work with. So yes, I agree with you, the article takes "Simple Made Easy" and turns it upside down. That talk is absolutely not about what was demonstrated in the article.