Well I agree that owning bonds in an extremely low interest rate environment doesn't make sense for me personally, but I disagree that dividend paying stocks are substitutable with bonds. If someone doesn't want to own bonds, they should make their peace with being 100% invested in stocks.
One of the arguments for owning bonds is it allows rebalancing into the stock market during crashes, because when the stock market crashes, bonds tend to stay the same or even increase slightly. However, the dividend autocrats behave a lot more like the total stock market index than like the total bond market index.
Blue = Vanguard total stock market index
Yellow = Vanguard total bond market index
Red and green = The first two companies from the alphabetical list of S&P 500 dividend aristocrats on wikipedia (3M and AFLAC).