That page is a lot of ink for very little data. It's also somewhat wrong - no, you can't claim the axis marks and labels aren't data ink at all just because it doesn't directly reflect the measure. They are still data that's extremely relevant to reading the chart. Yes, even if Tufte says otherwise.

Meanwhile, even Tufte's advice was explicitly to grey them down, but not completely remove them.

(And we can debate Tufte's advice - lots of other comments on this page how he had great aesthetic sensibility, but his advice wasn't grounded in reason or actual readability research, and so is limited to the examples he chose)