The HTAP vision was essentially built on the traditional notion that a database is a single 'place' where both transactions happen and complex queries run.

Rich Hickey argued [0] that place-orientation is bad and that a database should actually just be an immutable value which can be passed around freely. That's fairly in line with the conclusions of the post, although I think much more simplification of the disaggregated stack is possible.

[0] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Deconstructing-Database/