I was a webmaster for my uni (trying to handle the abhorrent monstrosities of Typo3) and some other unis around here (WordPress and Joomla), all of them while juggling with several other tasks (web development, graphic design, etc., etc.).

"Webmaster" being the person who adds, updates and deletes contents on a daily basis, and fixes misc, small issues with both frontend and backend. Or at least that's how that word has been used in those environments I've worked. My contracts listed that among web dev, graphic design and other tasks, one of them was doing webmaster duties.

With that in mind I feel like the author is extrapolating the concept quite a bit - one of the first quotes in the first part acknowledges that a "webmaster" is kind of a website administrator. Granted, in my case I learned some stuff "by force" because I had to deal with several stupid problems, and many of them that I caused by myself; but at no time I was supposed that my task was to make the website do something it was not supposed to do. It's rather a stressful job (believe it or not), as with pretty much anything web development related. But the point is that we as webmasters can't do much to do the truly thing that can save the current web, to reclaim it back from the greedy hands of the giant corpos.