You're right that there is a distinction between event sourcing within a service and events as coupling between services. But as someone who architected a service that used event sourcing internally and did not use event streaming, I feel the author's points still stand. I also currently work on a very complex application built on event sourcing principles, and again, the same challenges are present.

The reality is that event sourcing brings a lot of challenges that have to be grappled with. It's a great paradigm, but it's not easier than in-place mutation. At least, not without a bunch of tooling.