This reminds me a lot of Orwell's 1984; the police state forces everyone into a uniform, mindless, lifeless life.

I really don't think this holds in modern English; many foreign-origin word and phrases have rather specific meanings that can't really be replaced by other words. Of the seven examples he gave, five of them (all but the German ones) are ones that I've seen rather legitimate uses for. Cul de sac, deus ex machina, and status quo especially are rather commonly used in my experience.

I would definitely agree that these samples are all rather bad, and particularly needlessly obtuse.

Up to this point, I definitely have not bought into the necessity of such a fight as he is describing it; up to this point, he has not been specific about what he means by "bad English" other than describing it in a negative but subjective way.

This initially seemed to me like he was going to go into a "language change bad" rant, but fortunately he's just poking at some bad trends he saw in writing habits. Languages can and do change naturally over time, and there's not much you can do to properly stop that.

If you need to understand a topic in-depth, it certainly can be helpful to work through each of the steps and make sure you understand why they work. However, doing it all on your own without following the guidance of the paper feels a bit excessive.

I like this idea; it's very useful to be able to quickly get back to the major ideas of an article. I feel like having printed copies is a little annoying at times but super useful for this kind of things.

This lines up with the general advice that I've received before; before you get into the details, you want to figure out what the main ideas and results of the paper are (and if they're relevant to what you're doing), and the abstract and conclusion are the best sections for this.

This word (and some related ones) occur disproportionately often in academic writing; I find it almost funny.