Initially the author came across as having a vendetta against developers, like we are lining our pockets building APIs that nobody uses and have no value, but, of course, APIs are often either just tacked on to a product at very low cost, or are the backbone of the product, where the API severs both external requests which want the data, as well as the main website.
I've actually never built a website where I didn't build an API which served my content to a front-end single-page application.
The cost of working with APIs isn't on the side of the API creator, it's the consumers who are interfacing with the API who likely incur the most cost, often due to poor documentation or misunderstanding how the API should be used. Even researching all the available APIs and the requirements of each can be time consuming, but at the same time, it's still definitely cheaper than either building an entire service yourself or scraping webpages.
So what is the author's solution? He doesn't seem to have one.
I think you can skip this article if you haven't read it yet.
The cost of working with APIs isn't on the side of the API creator, it's the consumers who are interfacing with the API who likely incur the most cost, often due to poor documentation or misunderstanding how the API should be used. Even researching all the available APIs and the requirements of each can be time consuming, but at the same time, it's still definitely cheaper than either building an entire service yourself or scraping webpages.
So what is the author's solution? He doesn't seem to have one. I think you can skip this article if you haven't read it yet.