The author mentions that copy-pasting code by itself is not a bad thing. The problem with the phenomena they describe is that people copy-paste files around because they _don't understand it_, and end up with stuff that works, but is inefficient and hard to debug.
There's no virtue in writing something character by character.
If anything these languages and systems are better for the Makefile effect.
That you can't really do effective copy-pasting in imperative languages is a weakness.