Yeah, there's whole industries where you simply cannot operate without enforcing this. The author's view is pretty narrow, both on this front and on the other points.
The author mostly write about average startup work, not about industries or more constrained environment. A good example of this is the sprint thing: you can do whatever pace you want when you work on your own product that is a web product, but as soon as you work on something with hardware or marketing, you can't just use random deadlines.
