This was pretty stupid straw-man. I doubt anyone who has used Prophet is under any illusions as to what it is doing under the hood (after all, the only input is a single time series dataframe...). Companies use it to do quarterly/yearly goal setting and anomaly detection, not deploying it to production to power product features. This whole thing has the tone and substance of a giant "i am very smart" faff.
The author also seems annoyed that people get paid 200k for such little "technical" skill, to which I would ask why he cares?
Do you think he didn't think enough about the reasons he stated in TFA for why he cares? Or they're not good reasons?
He says, from the employer's perspective,
"$200k a year can attract people who actually know what they’re doing. Maybe a math or econ PhD. Maybe a Microsoft Excel pros with 10 years of finance sector experience";
from the prospective employee's,
"The aggregate effect of this practice being widespread is that talented people with unusual backgrounds get gatekept out of good paying jobs that they’d be exceptional at. ... The job post excludes people not based on aptitude, but based on whether they have previous experience and familiarity with a tool they could be introduced to and then master in under 15 minutes."
I think reason he gives about gatekeeping is only weakly related to the bulk of the article. The point is that job listings shouldn't be arbitrarily specific is an obvious one that most already agree with, and was a thin excuse to show off his deep knowledge of modeling jargon.
If you read the article further it morphs from "you gotta have a better time series tool bro" to an article about "if you don't know what adverse selection is, no amount of highly-paid machine learning engineers will help you".
This, I think, it a more valid point (and it was not only made by the author).
Or, let's say, it is at least a fun implication:
When companies like Amazon and Google hire hundreds of Econ PhDs to design platforms, market ops and auctions, it IS amusing to imagine that Zillow thought they could just "Machine Learn" their way through it and they fall flat on their noses.
The author also seems annoyed that people get paid 200k for such little "technical" skill, to which I would ask why he cares?