I think your points are correct. However, it really is difficult and requires lots of specialized domain knowledge to properly support a big group of the world's languages. I'd almost go so far as to hire a specialist developer just to do international character handling if that was a requirement of the software.
It is difficult and does require some learning, yeah. In fact, it's more difficult than the article hints at, because while it falsely speaks of languages it's actually only concerned with writing systems, and a lot of the more interesting localization problems happen on the actual language/grammar level (for example, plain gettext isn't good enough to handle Korean post-positions, so we try to do better[1] in KDE).
But we can and have built reusable tools to shoulder much of the burden, and because these problems are so fundamental and culture-enabling, it can actually be a really rewarding and satisfying area to work in. In fact, I bet if you catch the author on a better day, I wonder if he wouldn't agree.
