The article’s premise is mostly an arbitrary value judgement that a high number of tabs is negative in some way (“ridiculous number”). Notice that there is no concrete definition of what the drawback would be. There’s a strong element of rule-seeking and cleaning instinct at play. Not that there’s anything wrong with that ;)

What if the spoon didn’t exist yet? And people were just using the fork and knife.

People would invent spoon anyway to eat soups.

As for pasta, I never understood the whole spoon & fork thing. I tried it, it's not helpful. I do fine with just a fork, thank you.

Yeah, I never understood the pasta spoon thing either. I just don't see how it helps anything when you can simply use the plate as a backstop for the fork to roll the pasta correctly and not have hanging strands.

Apparently in Italy, the spoon rolling technique is only used by children.