Well, an alternative reading of this is "maybe we can solve some of the same problems with IndieWeb principles instead of ActivityPub."
These are not "hacked up RSS"; they're just RSS (well, more often Atom or JSON Feed) combined with other technologies like webmentions. These are all, like ActivityPub, IETF recommendations/standards. I've mentioned Micro.blog before, but it's worth mentioning again: it's a centralized server producing a Twitter-esque timeline, but the sources of posts might be individual blogs using any number of different blogging engines. When I post articles to my WordPress site, people can reply on Micro.blog and have those replies show up both in their timelines and as actual comments on my blog. (And in fact, behind the scenes, a "hosted" Micro.blog site is actually using all the same technologies, with Jekyll as the blog engine.)
As much as I like many things about Mastodon, I'm not convinced that it's a superior philosophy to Micro.blog's; the dark cloud to federation's silver lining is that the admins of any instance that your social graph connects to (that is, you follow someone on that instance and/or vice-versa) can break those connections without warning and with no recourse to you, beyond moving to another instance and hoping it doesn't happen again.
And, speaking more generally, I think the author definitely has some points that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand: it's possible that ActivityPub might indeed be better than other feed protocols at solving certain problems, but it's worth looking at each use case and asking if that's really true in this case. PeerTube might be one that ActivityPub excels at and that feeds don't, for instance. (I don't see anything about PeerTube's implementation that proves what it's doing with ActivityPub couldn't be done just as easily with, say, JSON Feed, but I haven't dug into that.)
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