Just to add - of course, blinking LEDs in itself is just about setting up your dev tools and writing a minimal test prog that will show you the whole chain is working, with an easy to prove result. You can do other very basic things for the same goal.
The key here is 1/ setting up your toolchain and 2/ testing it in a minimal way so as not to introduce too many parameters.
Two things are "wrong" with this article. First, the guy assumes/promotes the fact that industry-standard and proven languages/tools are obsolete, and that the future of embedded development is interpreted languages with a huge stack of libraries, like Python. This is just silly and 'clickbait' material. The two serve different purposes, and the latter are not replacing standard, compiled languages any time soon. Saying this is even very misleading for young people. And second, as others have pointed out, the example given is completely opposite of the idea of a "minimal test", thus introducing many parameters - too many: if it doesn't "work", where is the problem? If you're connecting to a network via WiFi, it doesn't matter if it's just a couple lines of Python (the hard part being all hidden). If it doesn't work, it could be for a myriad of reasons, including reasons not having anything to do with the platform you're testing.
But this article should just be seen as "tech journalism", nothing else.