This isn't a case against a "gridded" homepage... it's a case against arbitrary grids. The new page is still a grid, it's just a cleaner one, that does a better job of showcasing "what's important."
That's just playing with words and doesn't add much value.
That's why he said "gridded homepage" instead of "homepage using a grid system" (which is 99% of them), and even if it was unclear after that, the visual examples made what he meant totally obvious.
Hopefully someone writes one soon on those annoying parallax homepages also. We get it, you have high resolution photos. They aren't going to help me make business decisions and even worse, they're a very poor indicator of ability for designers. A 10 year old can put one together in a few days.
The new homepage still has a grid, it's just that the four main elements now have one full width column. I'm glad you wrote this post because it encourages people to think before arbitrarily breaking things up into a grid.
Exactly! theverge.com suffering from this problem too. When I visit that website, I want to see what's new. But I see a mangled mess of different articles that are not sorted.
I think this author is referring to using grids on a professional/business website. Half of what he says wouldn't apply to theverge because they're more of a magazine/article driven site. I'd argue grids are nearly perfect for those sort of sites.
He even goes on to say, "Your homepage isn't a gallery". Well, if your website is a gallery (in this case, a gallery of articles), then it doesn't apply. It's also the reason why newspapers have the same "gallery style" layout: http://i.imgur.com/4xCCE2B.jpg
Even worse, TheVerge is so full of markup and effects, that the responsiveness is s--t. I used to read TheVerge all the time, but it feels like walking in molasses. I rarely visit it these days.
I find the issue isn't grids, but whether you start designing your site with the intent of the chrome around your content being cool, or your content to be usable. All decisions flow from there.
I had a serious tl;dr problem with that post. I agree with the overall theme, but always remember what Mark Twain said: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."
