I think the charitable interpretation is that the author is referring to particular use-cases which stopped being served by CLIs.
Heck, just look at what's happening at this very moment: I'm using a textarea with a submit button. Even as a developer/power-user, I have zero interest in replacing that with:
echo "I think the..." | post_to_hn --reply-to=45742461
Heck, just look at what's happening at this very moment: I'm using a textarea with a submit button. Even as a developer/power-user, I have zero interest in replacing that with: