I'm inclined to side with the author. In the 13+ years I've been writing Java, there's only been a handful of cases where I switched a field to a more complex implementation. And in all of those cases, the IDE would have helpfully pointed out where I need to update client code. I can understand the value of strong encapsulation when publishing library code, but for internal code getters and setters are usually massive overkill.

Fortunately projectlombok takes away most of this pain, and pretty much every modern language post-Java makes attributes/getters a non-issue.