I see your point; ALIAS records are not a CNAME substitute and should not be treated as one. However, they do have their uses and the risk is minimal if you understand what ALIAS records are doing and how to use them.
I'm having a bit of a hard time following your example but I believe if the authoritative DNS provider simply inherited the TTL of the alias target then the behavior would be as desired. This gets back to donavanm's point that this is more an issue with the way ALIAS records are implemented then a problem with the concept of ALIAS records.
One other issue that the author doesn't touch on is that we now have 3 implementations of ALIAS records that I'm aware of (Route 53, github, and Heroku) and there are differences about how they behave. However we have those 3 providers using the same ALIAS to describe similar but significantly different things. This is clearly confusing and potentially disastrous for users.
I'm having a bit of a hard time following your example but I believe if the authoritative DNS provider simply inherited the TTL of the alias target then the behavior would be as desired. This gets back to donavanm's point that this is more an issue with the way ALIAS records are implemented then a problem with the concept of ALIAS records.
One other issue that the author doesn't touch on is that we now have 3 implementations of ALIAS records that I'm aware of (Route 53, github, and Heroku) and there are differences about how they behave. However we have those 3 providers using the same ALIAS to describe similar but significantly different things. This is clearly confusing and potentially disastrous for users.