It's not so much that it should suck, as much as that it probably will suck, just because you don't know what you're doing yet. So as you said, it's just to set your expectations right, not your ambition.

And this is where I deeply agree with the author, and why I don't spend as much time reading articles as I once did: All of this is advice is probably right, in context. In the incredibly rich and impossible-to-convey context of the author's situation. Used outside of that context, it could be exactly the wrong advice.

It's like Soeren Kierkegaard said, you can't pass experience on through writing, it has to be lived.