Anyone having any significant degree of knowledge in Network Protocols will say that timestamping between trustless nodes is a really bad idea...
The guy who wrote this is definitely not scholar, many words used are **Breaking** category.
Why Satoshi did not use timestamps? Because they are easily faked and there is no way to check them, merkle tree - not so.
While I agree on the mining dependency, the article does not provide any solution to problem.
One solution is per hash merkle trees (so multiple blockchains for each) - and removing the mining replacing it with accounting hubs.