There's a huge difference between interns and juniors. For one thing, junior engineers are full time employees with full benefits and regular expectations. For the most part, intern expectations are very low as far as any actual work goes, because they aren't there for long enough to really contribute to anything meaningfully. It's mostly a social thing and a game being played on both sides about whether or not to hook up after graduation. Companies don't actually expect to get any work product out of interns at all, that isn't the purpose of the programs, but junior engineers definitely will have real deliverables to take care of.
It's an odd article, and the premise is also extremely odd. It sounds an awful lot like rushing a frat, which I'm not sure would have been all that helpful for me as a junior engineer.
Real men don't write Pascal either, we write all our programs in Fortran.
In all seriousness, it's a valid opinion. All the best programmers I know had relatively bare bones setups. I've found when I get in the habit of using IDEs are things like ChatGPT, I start to get sloppy. If the language server or whatever is tracking the logic of the code to tell you whether it will parse correctly, then you aren't using your brain as much to do it.
This is what I tell people that ask if it's possible to break into the field without a degree as well, which basically amounts to "what do you mean by self taught".
There are all different kinds of self taught. The highest performers in any discipline are naturally going to tend to be self taught (for a variety of reasons, and not exclusively, many have formal education or training as well, and without exception they will have had some form of mentorship). But so are the lowest.There is a huge range of skill level among the self taught, including a lot of people that are so far ahead academically that they would get nothing out of doing the typical university education thing.
I'm also increasingly sick of the Linux eco-sphere these days. I think there is something to be said in favor of Linux ditching POSIX and other standards and that this inclination has definitely had some positives and pushed us forward further than we may have gone otherwise in some areas.
But I don't think a total lack of a standard was what should have replaced Unix standardization efforts.
I think my real issue with Linux is that it is increasingly complicated (both the kernel and most distributions). It doesn't feel as "open source" as some of the not even quite open source Unix's, because you need to be a domain expert in a particular area for you to be able to modify it correctly. When you've got a team of people responsible for the whole OS as a single package, there is some incentive to keep your area maintainable. You never know who is going to be switching teams or knocking on your door. With Linux the incentive structure is to make a name for yourself as "the <particular subsystem or utility program> guy", which opens up a lot of potential for feature creep and overengineering.