If it's a hit piece it is easily the longest and best researched hit piece I've ever read. It's mostly a summary of Humbird's report and the people it's "hitting" end up agreeing with basically everything in it by the end of the article, only arguing that where there's a will, there's a way.
The idea that any imaginable technology will become efficient enough to be competitive on useful timescales is wrong. In my lifetime battery storage for the grid and nuclear power are all examples of technologies that were once predicted to become highly efficient and widespread. Flying cars and moon bases are examples of tech people in the 60s and 70s frequently assumed were just around the corner but which never even got off the ground. Decades on nuclear is being killed by massively increased costs, and batteries have become more efficient but the gains have been incremental rather than exponential. They are still nowhere near being cheap or abundant enough to switch the grid to windmills.
Engineering challenges are real. Improvements are usually not exponential. Computers are an exception, not a rule, and even there the exponential growth story is complex and not ideal: the era of big chip performance improvements stopped decades ago and since then it's all been incremental improvements for anything that doesn't trivially parallelize, which is most stuff.
Finally, you're comparing lab grown meat to TVs and refrigerators. That's not a valid comparison. Those machines had no competition, they enabled huge, immediate quality of life wins that couldn't be obtained in any other way. Lab grown meat is - in the absolute best case - identical to normal meat. It doesn't improve quality of life in any way. It's basically an indulgence, a psychological prop that rich people can pay for to feel virtuous. For everyone who already feels virtuous enough and isn't interested in charitable giving, lab grown meat has no purpose, and especially, it's easy to rationalize away any small amount of guilt felt (e.g. better for the cow to have had a nice life in a field than never having lived at all, nature is full of predators that are nastier than us, scientists are lying about climate change, etc). So there just isn't the growth market that benefited things like TVs.
I know this was mostly an aside, but the comment on grid battery storage isn't quite right. This hasn't been widely publicized beyond people working in the industry, but the efficiency of battery storage actually has improved exponentially in the last 20 years. The cost of leading edge NMC battery packs has fallen from $1000+/kWh in the mid-2000s to around ~$100-150/kWh today. Most industry insiders believe grid-level battery storage can be cost effective somewhere in the $50-100/kWh range. So, pretty close.
The idea that any imaginable technology will become efficient enough to be competitive on useful timescales is wrong. In my lifetime battery storage for the grid and nuclear power are all examples of technologies that were once predicted to become highly efficient and widespread. Flying cars and moon bases are examples of tech people in the 60s and 70s frequently assumed were just around the corner but which never even got off the ground. Decades on nuclear is being killed by massively increased costs, and batteries have become more efficient but the gains have been incremental rather than exponential. They are still nowhere near being cheap or abundant enough to switch the grid to windmills.
Engineering challenges are real. Improvements are usually not exponential. Computers are an exception, not a rule, and even there the exponential growth story is complex and not ideal: the era of big chip performance improvements stopped decades ago and since then it's all been incremental improvements for anything that doesn't trivially parallelize, which is most stuff.
Finally, you're comparing lab grown meat to TVs and refrigerators. That's not a valid comparison. Those machines had no competition, they enabled huge, immediate quality of life wins that couldn't be obtained in any other way. Lab grown meat is - in the absolute best case - identical to normal meat. It doesn't improve quality of life in any way. It's basically an indulgence, a psychological prop that rich people can pay for to feel virtuous. For everyone who already feels virtuous enough and isn't interested in charitable giving, lab grown meat has no purpose, and especially, it's easy to rationalize away any small amount of guilt felt (e.g. better for the cow to have had a nice life in a field than never having lived at all, nature is full of predators that are nastier than us, scientists are lying about climate change, etc). So there just isn't the growth market that benefited things like TVs.