If you view this in the context of needing separate models for documents and application, it means that you wouldn't need all that substrate of APIs for documents (i.e, why would you need a webcam API or even AJAX to render a blog article?).
i.e, why would you need a webcam API or even AJAX to render a blog article?
This seems like a lack of imagination. The modern scientific publication Distill.pub makes heavy use of AJAX (eg https://distill.pub/2019/activation-atlas/) and it's easy to imagine it using a webcam (eg, to demonstrate semantic segmentation)
One of the reasond a platform succeeds is because it can be many things to different people.
I completely rejected the idea that there should be separated document and application models. Instead I think there are capabilities which should be layered to add abilities.
So in that context I do agree with the article.