Yo, the point is that the complexity is there because the well-intentioned and simple underlying systems were not properly scaled to meet the demands of modern applications. At no point does he suggest that you should eschew the tools that are in place to maintain the current complexity – that would be nonsensical, as you pointed out. He's arguing that we should use the system as it was designed, if that's at all possible, or re-architect the system to handle modern application complexity without increasing system complexity unnecessarily. Achieving this would be near impossible – see Plan9, Minix, VPRI, and Squeak for "failed" attempts – hence this being a rant and not a serious proposal.

Note also that Ryan is a mathematician. Mathematicians hate engineering because there's nothing to protect real-world systems from little accidents that compound over time. No proof, no piece of code, no matter how elegant, can reverse the thousands of bad design decisions that have resulted in the modern Linux ecosystem.