Help a foreigner out here... isn’t the humanities just a word for describing a lot of social sciences, from linguistics to art, from philosophy to politics? Is that what is meant in the US or is that just how I know it to be over here? It seems to me like you (and the author) are lamenting mostly about critical literature studies, which is a much smaller subset. If it is as I understand it to be, I would argue humanities are the study of what we produce as humanity instead of what is inherent in the world around us. There is a value I think in documenting, understanding and conceptualizing our own behaviors as It can lead to new ways and ideas to improve it, even if those improvements are eventually made in other domains than the humanities.
Piketty cited the difference in treatment of economics between the US and the EU as his reason for returning to France. In France, economics is the humanities. It is the study of human interaction as driven by value. In the US, economics is science because there are equations. Fundamentally, "the humanities" in the United States refers to anything without equations. So. Art, history, literature.