[bonoboTP]

Software works like this too, the author is confounding different aspects.

To see how software is like milk, you have to compare writing custom software for each and every client vs. writing one product and deploying this same program to all clients.

The analogy of mass production for software is when the same operating system runs on millions of machines.

However, the author of the article suggest that the equivalent of mass production is when a piece of software takes on a lot of responsibility, and gets bloated with features. But that's a totally different issue. When you compare ten cartons of 1 pint milk vs one carton of 10 pints, then you are dealing with indistinguishable ten cartons.

If you want a real world metaphor that's like software complexity, you could rather use recipes. Elaborate, complex recipes don't scale; just like software. There it's not trivial to put the non-indistinguishable ingredients together. With milk, it's just pour all the milk in one big container. There is no additional thinking required.

TL;DR author compares apples and oranges.