When someone asks me to draw an architecture diagram or a diagram of our production infrastructure or whatever, I am very slow at it and the result is usually middling at best, because my mental model of those things has no geometric or spatial component at all.
To the article's point, I've can't recall ever finding a visualization of my actual code or architecture that helped me work through a problem. When I've tried, it has always just slowed me down because I constantly have to map back and forth between the picture and the native non-geometric version in my head.
That's not to say I never use any kind of visualization. Graphical representations of things like profiling results are convenient and useful to me. But they tend to be more like representations of numeric data than representations of systems or code.
When I think out a problem I tend to do so in words rather than diagrams, on paper, or in Obsidian (or the FreeMind mind-mapper, which is really just a graphical outliner) until I have the whole thing in my head and all the relations are clear in my head. I don’t mean that I picture them, but everything fits together and I know it. By then I can write down and implement the solution.
It’s a very non-visual process, and I can’t really explain just what’s going on in my head. I think of it as loading the problem into my back-brain, which then condescends to let me know certain things about it. The actual structures, if you can call them that, are mostly hidden from my conscious mind.
But it works. I’ve been at this for four decades, and I’ve a reputation for writing reliable code. But it’s deeply weird, even to me.