Are you sure that article wasn't an interview with an author who wrote a book that took that stance? Having a conversation with someone who has arguably extremist views is very different from holding that extremist view.
Perhaps someone with a better understanding of physics could provide an ELI5 but for a software engineer (ELISE)? Have they literally created a device that causes photons to travel into the past? It seems like this is something different.
Management: We've got a great new project that has all the features that our users have been asking for. We need it done as fast possible, it's the number one priority. How fast can we get it done?
Engineers: For all of it? At least a year, probably more. Even a subset of those features will take six months, minimum.
Management: That's too long. You can have all the resources you want, we need to have it done in 90 days.
Engineers: That cannot be done. No amount of effort or engineers will get it done in 90 days.
I feel like drive and calendar go with e-mail fairly naturally. The play seems to be giving people willing to pay for a google alternative everything they'd want to replace. They can't give them everything but, encrypted storage feels like a fairly simple thing to provide and calendars are a well trod problem space.
Overall though, I agree with you. Proton seems like a solid company with good offerings and it would be a shame if they lost quality in their core offerings for the sake of adding features.
I can't speak to how prevalent it is in the industry, but something my team has started doing in our web services is building with GraalVM and deploying native images. The build time can be super long, but the benefit is incredibly fast start-up time, which really benefits horizontal scaling. We're using Quarkus (https://quarkus.io), which is largely built on Vertx which was mentioned elsewhere, but other frameworks (Micronaut (https://micronaut.io) comes to mind) make it easy and SpringBoot is also working on support. If your doing containers/kubernetes native images feel like the way to go.