They're making fun of Bootstrap, but having classes that allow you to define margins and padding quickly by adding a class is actually really helpful. Of course that shouldn't be expanded to every possible property.
You can use Foundation + sass processor and not need any of that garbage. My website just has nav, main, sidebar, etc. I define what I want into foundation to be mapped to them and the preprocessor creates my minified CSS.
I really don't know how to take your comment...are you suggesting that precompiling and overriding the functionality native to CSS is easier than just using a handful of classnames?
They're suggesting that Bootstrap-like classes that name and reference a specific visual rendering (e.g., col-md-hidden) are no better than the old ROWSPAN/COLSPAN mess. They've just moved from HTML attributes to being packed into the class attribute.
Then again, semantic markup was a huge pain in the ass before tools like SASS. Now you can actually name and categorize elements semantically in the markup, then decide what that actually means in the pre-processed CSS.
Edit: And it's true: Having recently gone through even a simple bootstrap-to-bootstrap redesign, we pretty much had to comb through every view and remove/replace non-semantic CSS classes. With SASS mixins and semantic markup, it'd have been a CSS-only change.
