alt Hacker NewsI think you are missing the entire point of the article (which I kinda agree with), and just repeating the popular wisdom.
In the era a machine with "object addressing" sounded like a perfectly valid futuristic design (what a Lisp machine strived to be; I guess today you would call it tagged memory of some kind). The 8086 is not that, but the original design would have allowed to evolve it into something like that.
The article's point is that since programmers simply treated it as a sliding window (instead of an opaque object handle), the plan could not be implemented, and the half-assed thing became stuck.
Having seen other Intel RISC designs, I fully agree with the premise.
But with only four segment registers, you couldn't treat it as that - not unless you only had four objects. So treating it as a sliding window was all you actually could do with it.