I've never found this article persuasive, that one should expect math to not be effective in such disparate areas. The question is, could it have been any other way, and what would such a world look like? While its conceivable that math wouldn't be so effective, such a world would necessarily have different laws that apply at different scales that are irreducible to more fundamental laws. The laws of the universe would necessarily be huge, perhaps uncountable. Considering the extreme end of this spectrum, such a universe would be random; that is, each particle and each subset of particles would have their own individual laws governing their interactions. Order of any kind would not exist.

Taking the other extreme, where there are a small set of laws that apply to the fundamental units of the physical world, there is order to the universe and everything is comprehensible with a finite amount of information. In this world mathematics is necessarily effective at all scales.

It seems pretty obvious that we exist in a universe with order on most scales, and so the effectiveness of mathematics is expected.