Those statements are quite clearly simplifications, provided for readers who lack accounting experience (e.g. the majority of readers, since it is an engineering-focused blog). That's entirely reasonable in context. I don't know why you're laser-focusing on these two phrases as some kind of smoking gun that discredits the entire piece.
On the "management gets to pick your depreciation period" one in particular, despite being a massive over-simplification, there is substantial underlying truth to the statement. The author's comment about "I can remember one of the big cloud vendors announcing they were going to change their fleet depreciation from three to four years and that having an impact on their share price" is specifically referring to Alphabet's 2021 Q3 earnings statement. See the HN discussion I linked in reply to the sibling comment.
I don't think they are simplifications, I think they are misleading.
Notice that I never disagreed with his underlying take. Everyone should have concerns about investments in the magnitude of 1 or 2 pp of GDP that serve novel and unproven business models. He even cites a few people that I love to read - Matt Levine. I just think that the way he is representing things is grossly misleading.
If I had little financial knowledge my take away from reading his article would be (and _this_ is a simplification for comedic purposes): all of these big tech companies are all "cooking the books", and they all know that these investments are all bad and they just don't care (for some reason)... and they just hide all of these costs because they don't have money... And this is not a fair representation.
I think we are too forgiving of these type of "simplifications", if you think they are reasonable, ok. I just shared my take, probably I should have stuck with just the observations on the content and left out the subtle ad hominem, so that's a fair point.
On the "management gets to pick your depreciation period" one in particular, despite being a massive over-simplification, there is substantial underlying truth to the statement. The author's comment about "I can remember one of the big cloud vendors announcing they were going to change their fleet depreciation from three to four years and that having an impact on their share price" is specifically referring to Alphabet's 2021 Q3 earnings statement. See the HN discussion I linked in reply to the sibling comment.