I disagree at some point. If person doesn't at least knows difference between hash-table and B+tree -- then he cannot build large scale systems. The same for other algorithms. Everything is based on algorithms, and without their understanding people often will build scalable applications that have really horrible performance, so they will consume lots of hardware to do simple things with wrong algorithms. And that's horrible.
If that's true, it's new. I don't know the difference between a B+ tree and any other type of tree, and I built the world's then-largest email system in the '90s, eventually pushing 4,000 TPS through servers less powerful than an iPhone. Some problems just don't involve algorithms at a visible level.
We had one filesystem with one type of key-value indexing, and whatever that was, that's what we used. Both disk I/O and RAM were too constrained to worry about O(n); n was < 500, data structures couldn't even exceed 32k, and even linked lists were too slow - we used arrays. The only algorithm we (consciously) used was a hashing function for our cache keys and sharding, and we were far more concerned about its uniform distribution than its performance.
That class of problem is less prevalent today, but it's at least plausible that there's somebody architecting large-scale systems where the only algorithm is "do very few things very quickly".
Memorizing some basic properties of a data structure or algorithm and using them as black boxes to design large scale systems is different from actually implementing said algorithms/data structures, let alone devising them in the first place. That's what the OP's blog is about.
The thing is hash-tables and B+trees are data structures and not algorithms. I agree that if you don't know basic differences of algorithms you will run into performance issues but you will also run into problems if you don't know the difference between a data structure and an algorithm.
Data structure is "a particular way of storing and organizing data", so I think there's not so big distinction between two. More of that, when we think of data structures, we think of insertion/deletion/searching complexity, also we think about space needed (which is also a result of organizing algorithm). So I don't think that someone can run into troubles because of that difference.
