A professional in _any_ industry will pick up a notable difference between extremely similar states. This article is expressing the fact that older computers were easier to read.
I'm convinced it's a product of sophistication. Distributed systems used to be an enterprise thing, but now everything is technically a distributed system. Memory registers are quantum scales more than they used to be. Drives now have no moving parts.
There are still ways to get an intuitive understanding, but they're...different, and certainly not audible. I've noticed that I can feel out I/O speeds when I'm power-using. I'm fairly convinced that many knowledge workers prefer a specific OS because this intuition pulling up false-positives in a new environment.