The post is long but it was really written from the POV of an infrastructure owner (DevOps) and not from the POV of a service owner/developer which is actually the target for Linkerd 2.0. FWIW - the post says it takes 5 mins to install Istio. I find that very, very hard to believe.
For different definitions of "installed", I guess. I've been at an Istio workshop and it was less than 5 minutes to have it up and functional. Tweaking it obviously takes longer but that's true for every tool.