I just got out of a long, long client meeting that touched on points tangential to this, and your comment was therapeutic to read. You're absolutely right - for 90% of people, their computer might as well be a browser, and 50% of those people don't even own a computer because their phone also has a browser, and the Facebook app is better than the desktop experience anyway!

You hit on a solid point with modern dependencies, too. It frustrates me a little bit that the author draws this line between access and ownership while talking about npm packages. I can keep my package-lock.json frozen in time if I want to, because those files are on my computer - I have high access to them through npm, and I also own the files (which kind of ruins the dichotomy he wants to present).

I can deploy my modern webpage how I want to, thank you very much! You know why I don't, though?

Because your shitty IE7 site from the fucking bronze age had so many vulnerabilities that the only reason you never got pwned was that everyone else was just as shitty at the time. Point being, ownership isn't a virtue if you don't do maintenance, and the example he pins the rest of his article on probably looks like this