The problem is very definitely real. "Helpful" comparison and review sites come up far too often, filled to the brim with affiliate links and, if you're lucky, excerpts from and links to reviews only tangentially related to the product at hand, when you go searching for a product that doesn't have dominant niche sites.
And I don't see how Kedrosky is a black pot in this case. He is not a search engine, nor is he a spammer, nor a purveyor of affiliate-linking review sites.
"Find some popular keywords that lead to traffic and transactions, wrap some anodyne and regularly-changing content around the keywords so Google doesn't kick you out of search results, and watch the dollars roll in"
Is he not doing exactly what he describes? He is writing about a topic popularized earlier in the day by TechCrunch. There are no objective measurements of the assertion that searching for dishwashers produces spam. As comments here note, searches for "dish washer" product pretty good results. Face it, it's the HN equivalent of Google spam.
And I don't see how Kedrosky is a black pot in this case. He is not a search engine, nor is he a spammer, nor a purveyor of affiliate-linking review sites.