My biggest grief with regexp is that it is just a compact code disguised as something else. It is relatively common that you want to scan a string but action codes intermixed. There is a way to do that with regexp (Perl (?{...}) etc. or PCRE callouts), but it is always awkward to put a code to a regexp. As a result we typically end up with either a complex code that really should have used a regexp but couldn't, or a contorted regexp barring the understanding. The essay suggests `(*SKIP)(*FAIL)` at the end, which is another evidence that a code and a regexp don't mix well so a regexp-only solution is somehow considered worthy.
