[amoonki]

I agree, but I think the "word problems" the author was referring to are much lower quality than the ones you're thinking of. I imagined some highly-contrived exercises where all of the relevant information is already pre-processed for you, removing any need for problem decomposition. For example, "if the angle between the ground and a tree's shadow is 45 degrees and a 50 ft tall telephone pole that's 10 ft away from the tree casts a shadow..." (substitute a similar differential equation problem). As you point out, half the fun is defining a problem and breaking it down, and these kinds of word problems don't give you a chance to do that.