Fair warning: don't bounce off the first paragraph like I did. "Dumb queries" made me think the author was arguing against SQL sophistication — I was halfway through composing a rebuttal about stored procedures and keeping logic in the database before I actually read the rest.

Turns out the article advocates exactly that. The example uses CTEs with multi-table inserts. "Dumb" here means "no synchronous external service calls," not "avoid complex SQL."