[makeitdouble]

That's not what the article is about but the question of what level of abstraction and how flexible it needs to be is always interesting.

On table schemas, I think designers will usually have a good idea of how stable it needs to be and what should go in it. For instance someone creating an invoice table will probably already have a set of unvariable stuff that need to go there for sheer legal reasons.

The other part being, an unefficient or slightly clunky table schemas is not the end of the world and can either be fixed, even in pretty active production envs (it's "just" that much more effort and cost intensive) or be dealt with at the application layer.

Stacking abstractions is always an option if nothing else helps, and I'd see trying denormalized at the very start of a new application a worse tradeoff and lack of thinking about what the application is supposed to do at its core.