I take a couple of issues with the author here. I don't personally worry much about breaking away from strict OOP. When a pattern like this develops it is usually because the data is too dynamic for a static property list. An obvious example is for creating reports. No one is going to sit down and hand design every single multi column report in a large project (I tell a lie, people do, it just makes the code base a horror show). By letting the data be more dynamic (Usually with JSON) it is trivial to create generic report structures and populate them.

Additionally, if you are using NoSQL as a backing store then solutions like class serialization don't make any sense since you will need to communicate in JSON anyway.