First, digital printing allows anyone to sloppily OCR public-domain works (or download them from Project Gutenberg), typeset the text haphazardly, and put it on Amazon. The result is terrible for reasons that have little to do with the limitations of the technology. Take the Russell book: terrible kerning ("Proble ms"), an AI-generated artwork... and I suspect the rest is about as bad.
The second problem is the technology also encourages "real" publishers to aim lower because there's no up front investment at stake? If you have an older, low-volume book, providing a shoddy version will make you more money than letting it go out of print.
From my point of view, what you are describing is "if you're the owner of an interesting but niche work, making it available in a basic version will please a lot of people who want to buy and read it".
The alternative to most of these 'shoddy versions' from reputable publishers is simply no version at all. Not sure why the author of the article wants to enforce this on people who actually want to read these books, rather than ooh over print quality and hoard them as luxury objects.