the author should care because he's writing an article about it, and taking the time to make sure you have the terminology correct is a good thing to do.
but your main point is good: why should the average end user care. i've had the same frustrations with certbot - it tries to be too smart and too magic, and i want to better understand what it's doing. thankfully, the ansible letsencrypt module exists, and behaves in a much more understandable way to me, and that's why it's important to point out the distinction between letsencrypt and certbot - you don't have to use certbot, and everybody who uses letsencrypt should be aware of that. because the author is correct, certbot is kind of a turd, but letsencrypt is awesome and it would suck for people to stop using letsencrypt just because they don't like certbot.
Can we stop with this nonsense about static sites not needing https? It's not just there to protect secrecy. Integrity is vital with how many parties are happy to inject content into any unencrypted https connection these days. Browsers should be able to know that they're receiving the same bytes the server is sending.
That would be great for a lot of reasons, but it's not a satisfying answer here.
For one, it'd only help web traffic that was entirely within the US, and only traversed networks within the scope of the FCC's enforcement operations. Do you really trust that coffee shop wifi? I don't, and I don't think it'd ever be big enough for the FCC to care.
Second, such an FCC could always revert back to current behavior. It's not any more reliable to depend on politics to fix a technical problem than it is to depend on technology to fix a political problem.
but your main point is good: why should the average end user care. i've had the same frustrations with certbot - it tries to be too smart and too magic, and i want to better understand what it's doing. thankfully, the ansible letsencrypt module exists, and behaves in a much more understandable way to me, and that's why it's important to point out the distinction between letsencrypt and certbot - you don't have to use certbot, and everybody who uses letsencrypt should be aware of that. because the author is correct, certbot is kind of a turd, but letsencrypt is awesome and it would suck for people to stop using letsencrypt just because they don't like certbot.