I don't buy it even as to pianos.
The dude who wrote this was not alive 100 years ago.
Think about it this way:
In the late 1960s, there were lots of cars made. Most of them were just OK. Some were pretty good. Some were awesome.
Ten to fifteen years later, those cars had largely worn out. The "OK" cars weren't worth maintaining, so they ended up in junkyards. Maybe the pretty good cars were being maintained, but probably not for much longer. The awesome ones were, of course, still being treasured by their owners.
Another ten years later, the "OK" cars form the 60s were almost all gone to junk yards. So were nearly all of the pretty good cars. The only cars from the 60s that were still being driven in the mid 80s were, by and large, the awesome ones.
So, someone who got his license in the mid 80s (such as me) might have thought that the cars from the 60s were awesome, and that the industry had much higher standards than in future generations. That's not true at all. Most of the cars from the 60s were mediocre, but the only ones left in the 80s were the standouts.
This piano guy would have had the same experience. Many pianos do not survive 40 years. After 40 years, the mediocre ones have worn out, and the cost of a rebuild would be more than the mediocre piano would be worth. Even if the author of this article is an old crumudgeon, he may have started playing piano in the 50s or 60s at the earliest. Which means that by the time he played pianos from the early 1900s, the only specimens of those pianos left were the ones worth keeping fifty or sixty years. The author is simply not old enough to have a realistic perspective on what "all" or "most" or "some" of the pianos from the early 1900s were like.
There are spectacular pianos being made today. Not all current production Steinways are incredible, but if you track down a Model D (which runs over $100k new) and pretend that it's not a great instrument, then you clearly have an agenda and no credibility. I have a 1970s model B, which was not their best decade, but it is still an incredible piano. There are some smaller makers today that produce even greater quality.
Guitar players get excited about the tone from a $5k or $10k guitar. Piano players spend twenty times that much for a good instrument. The piano industry has every incentive, and all the technology, to cater to the very high end demand that is definitely out there. In an industry in which players spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single "great" instrument, it is ludicrous to believe that no one is using the available technology to deliver the best possible quality to the highest end of that market.
I echo what everyone else says about guitars. The way knowledge and technology is shared, and with the tools and materials that are available, of course the best builders today are producing the best guitars in history. There is junk today too. There was junk 100 years ago, and plenty of it, although it didn't survive a century so you might not ever see it.
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