I was hoping to see any mention of large file downloads and uploads. Nevermind the article’s ponderous “I can’t imagine any use case for more than 5GB/s”, that’s a use case today where higher speeds above 5GB/s would be helpful. For example, a lot of AAA games are above 100GB, with the largest game in my steam library being over half a terabyte (DCS World). Ideally I wouldn’t have to store these games locally, but I do if I want to have access to them in any reasonable amount of time.
It also takes ages to back up my computer. 18 terabytes of data in my case, and that’s after pruning another 30 terabytes of data as “unnecessary” to back up.
I don't think the article ever claimed that nobody would ever want speeds above 5G. But you have to admit that your use case is uncommon. Only a tiny fraction of people has anywhere near 18 TiB stored locally and an even smaller group regularly wants to do cloud backups of all of it. There are various solutions for only backing up the diff since the last backup, rather than uploading the full image.
Are you downloading AAA games or backing up your computer over mobile?
Also, I hope you're doing differential backups, in which case it's only the initial backup should be slow. Which it's always going to be for something gargantuan like 18 TB!
It also takes ages to back up my computer. 18 terabytes of data in my case, and that’s after pruning another 30 terabytes of data as “unnecessary” to back up.