The fact that people expect a data object, as argued by the author, is a very strong argument in favor of having one.
Onboarding new programmers to your codebase and making the codebase simpler for developers to reason about is a massive non-functional benefit. Unless you have a very strong reason to do things otherwise, follow the principle of "least surprise". In fact vibe coding adds another layer to this - an LLM generally expects the most common pattern - and so maintenance and testing will be orders of magnitude easier.
I agree that following expected patterns is a _prima facie_ reason to do something. That said, in this case:
1. The downsides of following it are severe, and 2. People often expect slightly different things, so you often don't get the benefits of following convention.