Anyway, what they made works perfectly for me, I luckily don't use any of the fancy graphics packages that use Lua. I use Latex a few times a year at most, and Tectonic just works for me. With my previous Lualatex workflow I had to deal with Tlmgr and that whole ant's nest, figuring out one by one which packages I was missing each recompile.

Seems like the main argument against Xetex in the article you linked is that it is unmaintainted, so it doesn't really apply to Tectonic, but it's a bit frustrating that an opportunity for ecosystem convergence potentially has been missed.