Running programs in a decentralized, trustworthy way is useful for a million usecases.
One of the things this article gets wrong is how "facts about the real world" are made available to smart contracts.
It states that this is done via "a conventional program" and it makes the whole system "pointless".
Oracles can be set up in a way so that they rely on an incentive structure just like the rest of the system.
Example: The DAI stable coin does not hold its peg to the dollar because a conventional program feeds the DAI/USD price into the system.
What is the incentive structure that facilitates pegging DAI to the dollar?
Very complex. https://github.com/makerdao/dss/wiki
The summary appears to be that participants can stake their non-DAI crypto assets into the system, and then borrow an equivalent amount of DAI at current prices minus a haircut (e.g. 80% of what they put in). This is the way DAI is created. Borrowers pay interest on their borrowed DAI. (How does this not result in a negative total amount of DAI? not sure)
If your borrowed DAI falls below another threshold (e.g. 90%) of the value of your collateral, you lose all your collateral. Someone somewhere gets to buy your collateral for only 90% of its dollar value in DAI, and is incentivized to do so because they can then get 100% of the value back on the open market. Therefore borrowers are incentivized to keep their borrowing below this threshold.
That's a pretty standard DeFi loan system; it seems there are also a lot more tacked-on bits which, I assume, prevent it from melting down in a similar way to all the other DeFi loan systems...
Yeah, agreed some of the things people point to with regards to the oracle problem are hysteria or not relevant but it is a very real problem. It also leads to lots of confusion (or grifting) when people don't acknowledge it and act like you can have "trustless weather reports" or things like that. Many oracle problems won't arise until the stakes are high enough