The article missed the biggest advantage of TeX. The fact that it doesn't change.
I can take a document written any time in the last 25 years in TeX and print it today. It will still print the same way that it did then, modulo available printing technology, down to the visible wavelength of light. I can then tweak it and print the edited version, without any loss of formatting. Using WYSIWYG word processors and random formats that have existed over that time, not so much.
It isn't just word processing formats. The same is also not true of other printing formats such as postscript and pdf. (Witness in this thread how pdf documents that printed fine for one person not printing correctly for another. That with a pdf created this year.)
This trait is very important for anyone who needs to archive documents. Such as happens all of the time in academia...
Maybe in TeX, but my experience with LaTeX had been a little different because the packages and interdependencies between them changes with the time.
I mean, if you take a non-trivial document using several packages from several years ago, and try to compile now, a likely result is the compilation fails with some obscure error or the original result can be different in unexpected ways.
Usually that can be fixed with the use of a new option or calling a different command or little things like that, however the point of compatibility through many revisions of many packages (and its interactions) in LaTeX is something to be warned about.
This is why you should archive the packages along with the source for your document. This way you'll maximize the chances of being able to regenerate it at some point in the future.
Why wouldn't LaTeX also require the OS to be archived for equivalent results? Although LaTeX often uses it's own bitmap based font system it does require X and supporting infrastructure.
Because unlike Word, LaTeX can easily be rebuilt from source. And it should work on future versions of the OS. Though, of course, there's no guarantee of that either. So might be best to archive the OS too, just in case.
I can take a document written any time in the last 25 years in TeX and print it today. It will still print the same way that it did then, modulo available printing technology, down to the visible wavelength of light. I can then tweak it and print the edited version, without any loss of formatting. Using WYSIWYG word processors and random formats that have existed over that time, not so much.
It isn't just word processing formats. The same is also not true of other printing formats such as postscript and pdf. (Witness in this thread how pdf documents that printed fine for one person not printing correctly for another. That with a pdf created this year.)
This trait is very important for anyone who needs to archive documents. Such as happens all of the time in academia...