I wouldn't consider the industry backing of Heroku and a collective 4,500+ GitHub stars between the tools particularly niche or obscure. Crank it up to ~20k stars if you want to count deploy tools that can use them, like Dokku or Flynn. Anyway, the other great thing about Procfile is that it's just a declarative format. Lots of tools can leverage them, and they are an important part of my and many others' workflows.
I also don't think the article is too keen on "standards", judging by it referring to make a "task launcher" and the suggested usage completely diverging from the expected behavior of the program.
I also don't think the article is too keen on "standards", judging by it referring to make a "task launcher" and the suggested usage completely diverging from the expected behavior of the program.