It's not just a pity piece. It's trying to address the mid-80s shift from pensions (defined benefit) to 401k style plans (defined contribution). This was an important discussion back then but I think it's largely been forgotten.
The old model was that your employer took part of your income and invested it for you, then used those assets to pay your expenses in retirement as your pension. This meant that there was essentially one investment manager per employer. The new model was to let each individual invest their own income, which employers like because they didn't actually pay the employees the money that was previously going toward the pension plan, they just took that money for themselves and let employees worry about funding their retirement instead, which is effectively just a wage cut. This plan opens up the possibility of each and every employee needing to hire an investment manager, so the financial industry was heavily lobbying for it. They salivated at the notion of fleecing a hundred million individual financially illiterate employees, instead of having most of that money controlled by educated pension administrators at a handful of major corporations.
401ks were designed to transition retirement risk from the employer to the employee. Pension managers would continue to get revenue from the corporations to fund old pensions but would not have to fund any new pensions, which shored up the existing pension system. New employees were no longer eligible for pensions and were free to completely avoid saving for retirement and thus retire broke. That's the demographic this article is addressing, those people who grew up in a time when your employer paid for your old age but were then handed 401k plans instead, and didn't know enough to contribute to them. There's a whole generation in the middle there that got totally screwed by being financially illiterate right at the transition.
Today I think it's less of an issue. We all know that a 401k is a vital part of a retirement plan, and maxing it out can even let you retire at an earlier age than you ever could with an old style pension plan.
The trade off for this benefit is that we are each now individual risk managers. When a pension plan had 10,000 employees they invested the same way we do, but they always anticipated SWRs of around 6% or more because that's the historical average SWR for a 30 year payout period and most people didn't live 30 years after retiring, so they had to save much less money per person. Now that we're no longer pooling our risk with a pension, we each have to individually do that calculation and the 50% success rate of a 6% SWR seems pretty risky to folks, so we generally shoot for 4% instead. That's a 33% increase in the amount we each need to save (25x instead of 16.66x expenses), which keeps us working longer, on average. Which is also good for the company.
Basically corporations and the finance industry both benefited by pushing people out of pensions and into 401k plans. Not everyone benefited from being pushed.