I found the whole article to be a bit heavy on anti-academia. And I went to industry after undergrad.
It's a false dichotomy between the "thinkism" bogeyman (actually reading books and papers and putting work into theoretical design is just bad now? Have they tried building anything in the physical world? Checked in with nuclear physics, ever?) and hands-on experience. Both are important. It should be about balance, not trashing an incredibly valuable set of tools because others exist...
I am team academia more than hands-on experience. And I have 5 years of experience. To me, it felt like most SWE things could eventually be solved by what I learned at school.
Not everything I did I learned at school, such as navigating codebases with more than a million lines of code. But most things? Yea.
With that said, I am curious how people say that they learned much more through experience, what did you specifically learn?