I find that to be very true. Seems a lot of amateur programmers pick up CakePHP for one reason or another without actually knowing PHP and try to drive every screw with the one hammer they have. When everything's suddenly broken they blame the hammer.
EDIT: Although I suppose the author's point of view is from the outside-in where he's tasked with cleaning up the mess that amateurs leave behind and has a bias against it.
If you know what you're doing you will not pass around huge arrays (in PHP) by value. Or pass them around (in CakePHP) at all, it's maybe a MVC warning flag that you do something in a place you shouldn't.
Related note: CakePHP 3.0 (current is 2.x) will use objects [1].
EDIT: Although I suppose the author's point of view is from the outside-in where he's tasked with cleaning up the mess that amateurs leave behind and has a bias against it.