These reference architectures always look less like anything a sane person would come up with than an opportunity to cram every possible cloud service into a solution and jack the price of hosting a simple web app up into the thousands of dollars a month.
Actually when I saw the diagram at the top of the article I thought "Yup, that looks almost exactly like the architecture of the last project I worked on", as it uses all those AWS services in roughly the same arrangement.
That's not to say I disagree with your comment though...
