It's an awkward article. To answer why a query is slow you need a bit more details than just the query. Also, I reread about timeouts and didn't get it, what was the database, whether it was a database issue, how it was related to migration.

The only information I could extract was that the company made bad architectural decisions, believes in ORM (looking at the queries, there are many doubts that the data layouts in DB are adequate) and cannot clearly explain situations. But this is only interesting to their candidates or investors.

It may sound rude, so I apologise.