Call me a curmudgeon, but.....
While I don't doubt the effect described is real, I have somehow managed to shoot lenses with aspherical lens elements for at least a couple of decades without noticing this as a problem in real world images. We seem to have reached an era where the in-focus parts of images are so good that we now spend more time looking the out-of-focus parts of the image, at 100% magnification, and finding problems that just NEED to be solved. If you need to pixel peep to notice this, and ignore the real subject matter of the image to care, I think there are more important problems to be solved. Somehow photographers have managed to make extremely pleasing, and even prize-winning, photographs in spite of the pain of onion-ring bokeh. Heck, for most of the history of photography we managed to make pleasing images without even knowing "bokeh" existed.
The article states
bokeh was once a largely Japanese concern, an obscure thing that the Japanese photo dilettantes worried about, but that most amateurs here in the US were hardly aware of. As photographers have become more sophisticated and learned from each other over the Internet though, more and more people have come to appreciate the blessings of beautiful bokeh.
I would argue that the word dilettantes applies no matter what part of the world we're discussing. Those most vociferous in their arguments about the bokeh of various lenses are often those whose images are the least interesting and enjoyable. Possibly because they've forgotten that subject and composition are even more important than the out of focus background. The doubled lines of the bicycles in that one example would be nearly unnoticeable in a normal sized print that included the actual subject of the photo. The fact that they need to crop and enlarge a small out of focus area to make the point sort of makes mine.
Advancing technology is a good thing, in general, but a real ISO 50, and even ISO 25, and manufacturers actually focusing (no pun intended) on the usability of their menus and camera controls would be much more important to me than eliminating this "problem."
All that said, it was an interesting article. It's interesting how the industry has, at least a little bit, come full circle. In the old days, the best optics were made by skilled lens makers (people, not companies) who learned their craft over time, and used their "calibrated fingers" to hand finish precision optics. Eventually technology advanced to the point that machines could perform with equal precision, and higher reliability. Now we're back to relying on skilled individuals to do the finest work.
