Auto Tune has been the industry standard for longer than that article claims and I guarantee you that 99% of major releases across ALL genres in the past 25 years have had some sort of pitch massage, often without the artist's knowledge. I'll use it as an effect, cloning a track and purposefully detuning it for a backing double-track to help place things in the stereo field, but if a lead vocal take is bad, it gets re-cut. I don't even like doing cut and paste edits that are the equivalent of analog punch-ins. Music isn't about uniformity and besides, most "corrected" pitch actually isn't because the software can't compensate for tempered scale since the algorithms are based on mathematical intervals. It works on the same principle as a vocoder. I have no problems with it being used as an artistic tool, but when it's employed to compensate for lack of talent, it's just garbage.
Even worse, but not mentioned in the article at all, is tempo-mapping which is enabled as standard on almost every software sequencer. It's actually quite difficult to disable on many of them. It mathematically "corrects" note locations based on BPM and will kill a natural groove in nothing flat, and it is every bit as prevalent, even among many of the "musician" supergroups. It makes cut and paste editing much easier, so lazy producers LOVE it. That's one of the "lost" virtues of tape recording: musicians actually had to be able to perform to make a song.
