The point the critics of this piece seem to be missing is that there is not an exceptional case here that needs an error to be thrown. There are NO printers attached to the device (in this case by definition), and an app should cleanly handle that case, not crash. You wouldn’t throw an exception on a laptop just because it couldn’t reach the printer.
If you want a clear, modern example of a popular non-Microsoft product doing printer availability wrong, it's gnome-control-center.
Add a printer in Settings. While the printer is installing, click over to the "Color Profiles" tab. If you time it right, gnome-control-center will crash. If you dive into the details, you see that it was trying to enumerate the available printers (it knows one should be there) but that info doesn't exist yet. So it just crashes.
Thankfully, the fix is to just wait a few seconds for GNOME to finish installing the printer and restart Settings. Still, it's the principal app responsible for making your desktop work correctly as an end user with some unknown computing background. In a perfect world, this app should never crash.
It's hard to think about edge cases. It's even harder to imagine your handling of edge cases has its own edge cases. Right or wrong, at least the author is thinking deeper than "bad app, needs to be rewritten to support Wayland"
