The more portable and general your code is, the less use you can make of the hardware.

The article touches on the 32/64 bit split. A lot of the code I write nowadays doesn't run on 32 bit systems, not because it uses a lot of RAM, but because having an actually usable 64-bit address range enables you to write programs that you couldn't on 32 bit.

If you want to write code that works on big endian systems, systems where pointers aren't integers or bytes aren't 8 bits, all the power to you. I'm happy to pretend big endian is not a thing and focus my limited manpower on the hardware that my program will run on.