I think the author is missing the point of modern systems administration. I wonder what the average number of servers a system administrator manages today, versus ten years ago? I would guess it has increased by a factor of around 10, particularly with the rise the 1U commodity servers, virtualization, etc. Sysadmins just don't have the time to treat our OS like a zen garden. The OS, especially with modern *nix, has become a kind of commodity, while the bulk of system admin work has moved to a higher levels of application management, systems integration, etc.
This is where I think the author fails most prominently, by implying that sysadmins who simply re-image (a claim that is a straw man) are somehow not as sophisticated and nuanced. Consider instead that they may be working at a higher, more complex level. This whole argument reminds me of the old debates System V admins would have with the rising Linux admins: this notion that package management was for weenies who don't "understand" the intricacies of dependency resolution. I remember incredibly excruciating debates where these folks would insist that spending hours resolving dependency hell was "good" for the craft because, after all, you should know and configure every last component on your system! God forbid it is done automatically for you, with literally tens of packages being installed with somewhat perfunctory knowledge, so that you could move onwards to accomplish the actual task at hand.
Sorry, sysadmin's don't have time for nostalgia. Save the sob stories of a bygone era for an industry that isn't based on constant change.