We're talking about different stages of evolution. Scale is rarely a factor during your first few years. Of course software can be moats, but much, much later.
Anyone could have used Markov Chains to implement PageRank in 1997, but no one did. And Dropbox was laughed at here on HN for being a simple python wrapper for ftp. Any "tried-and-true professional CEO" had the resources to implement something 10x better, but they didn't. It happens that CEOs are usually busy delivering quarterly results, and won't chase every shiny opportunity.
My point (and the article's) is that until recently it was nearly impossible for startup founders to go from 0 to 1 without strong technical skills. Non-technical founders were almost always DOA: too costly to get to an MVP, and no VC would fund someone who doesn't have something concrete to show. Brian Chesky (Airbnb) comes to mind as one of the few counterexamples.
That barrier is now drastically reduced. I'd go as far as to say that the new stereotypical startup founder for the next decade is someone coming from a product / design background, and not engineering / computer science.
