I think the article addressed this. Any time the reader has to reach for an add-on or click some other button to make your site readable, they're more likely to just go elsewhere. After all, quit a bit of the article talks about font sizes and colour contrasts -- both easily fixed by flipping to Reader Mode (I assume Chrome has something similar?) but really, how often do I do that? Hardly ever... the reading matter has to be reeeally compelling for me to bother with that.

Any friction at all is still a friction.

I hear ya. And I think that web accessibility has gotten better in the last year. But many sites are still squint-ville.

Yep, Reader is really great for seeing the main article on a page, no question. But sometimes there's a lot left aside. And you just need a little help seeing it.

Take a look at the 'Dark/Light' addon, I've used all day every day for over a year. Very little fiddling involved. You get to set the background, text, and link colors for everything. Finito, all problems solved (apart from using control-scroll to zoom font-size).