The thing is, if you lost your share certificate, but could still prove to the registrar that you were the legitimate owner of those shares, there's a good chance you would get them back. Likewise, if you accidentally burned a bunch of banknotes, but had sufficient fragments remaining to prove your ownership, your central bank is likely to be able to recompense you. That's one of the consumer-friendly features of centralised systems, which is considered a bug in consumer-hostile decentralised systems.
Failing to take additional steps before a loss is conceptually very different from being able to take additional steps after a loss. You might as well list a whole bunch of additional things he could have done before throwing away the hard drive, e.g. having a recovery phrase split over multiple pieces of paper each stored in different bank vaults (like the Winkelvii), or simply keeping a back-up of the hard drive contents. If you lose the PIN to access your bank account, your bank would never say something like "sorry, can't help, you should have done X, Y or Z before you lost your PIN, but never mind [to quote Satoshi from the article] Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more."
