I had intended to applaud the author and assert that this was one of the few examples of essays on good writing that I've recently read that is also itself an example of good writing. So your critical comment comes as a surprise and a challenge, especially since I think you are right in a crucial respect: it would take a bit of work to isolate and evaluate specific actionable tips on writing well from the essay. But I read the essay in the first place as an exhortation to others to aspire to write well, to recognize the importance of writing well, to appreciate and confront the difficulty of it, and, indeed, to provide an example of it. In these respects, I think the essay has succeeded admirably, and in these respects, too, it is doing something that most essays on writing, including the ones that would well satisfy the criterion that you invoke, fall short.

I think one of the important, if implicit, ideas of the essay is that it's not possible to learn to write very well without being able to fix in your own mind an ideal representation of what good writing is against which to measure your own real efforts. Reading and recognizing the right examples can go a long way towards reaching that goal, and while the essay emphasizes the hard work of writing over the work of attentive reading, it nonetheless is the kind of essay that contributes, by virtue of its logical development and style, to my idea of what good writing is.