All the "hurr durr save the A-10" comments on that article have got me convinced!
Anyway, people who do know the airplane will tell you that where it shines is the mission systems that make higher situational awareness possible, much, much better than previous airplanes. They're not going to go into detail about it if you don't have need-to-know and besides, the average reporter and clickbait reader wouldn't have the attention span to appreciate it.
The downside is it's a poster child for the "jobs for every congressional district" and the "no colonel left behind" programs of DoD procurement, although we got exactly what we asked for (collective "we").
It's expensive as hell to run, and the cost per flight hour is a very fair criticism on the program managers who let that figure get as high as it is. The message the taxpayers get is these guys just accepted "whoops, guess that's gonna be expensive too" as an acceptable answer, over and over again ever since this airplane was on the drawing boards and they have every right to be mad about that. (Wouldn't "program mismanager" be a better job description??)
In all fairness to the A-10 fans, many of them have personal experience of being grunts with loud, up close and personal air support- that keeps the bad guys' heads down and it lets the good guys know somebody has their back more than anything else. I don't dismiss dismiss that kind of credibility, but at the same time their biggest problem is their main argument: it always turns into one guy yelling, "you don't know what close air support is" and the next guy yelling, "no, yooooouuuu don't know what close air support is," then the guy after that, "zoomies don't care about grunts" while they all wave whatever doctrine each one was brought up under as the eternal gospel truth of ground warfare.
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