You might agree with the author if you are working with self-managing team where everyone is capable to deliver something daily.
But more often that's not the case:
1. "Members of the team already know what I did yesterday, because they can see the completed items in the "DONE" column on the Scrum Board." - this is not true, because in case someone is a slacker in a team and does nothing you won't be able to track that, you can't see progress of "doing nothing" unless two days in a row you hear the same person still "working on the same problem". Everyone who participates in a stand-ups knows that bad feeling when you are on a standup and you don't have to say anything about what you have done, you force yourself to fix that because that embarrasses you.
2. "This question is a little maddening, isn't it? I can tell you what I'm planning on doing today, like maybe finishing the task that I just told you I was halfway through, and then grabbing the next..." - this is to prevent multiple persons on jumping the same task, that's your daily planning.
3. "Waiting for the daily stand-up is a terrible way to deal with impediments." - again, nobody forces you to wait for a standup to deal with problems that arise, this is used to explain why were you spending so much time on fixing some small bug. For example - you spent whole day trying to fix a bug, but the fix itself was a "one-liner". After looking to your commit I could make a false assumption that you were slacking the whole day and only made a single "change" where on a standup you have time to explain what problems forced you to spent whole day on tracking down that bug...
Another example - someone spends whole day on a feature but still doesn't finish that even though it's trivial to implement, he might either explain that he faced a problems that prevented him from implementing that feature faster or he won't have anything to say because he was slacking
But more often that's not the case:
1. "Members of the team already know what I did yesterday, because they can see the completed items in the "DONE" column on the Scrum Board." - this is not true, because in case someone is a slacker in a team and does nothing you won't be able to track that, you can't see progress of "doing nothing" unless two days in a row you hear the same person still "working on the same problem". Everyone who participates in a stand-ups knows that bad feeling when you are on a standup and you don't have to say anything about what you have done, you force yourself to fix that because that embarrasses you.
2. "This question is a little maddening, isn't it? I can tell you what I'm planning on doing today, like maybe finishing the task that I just told you I was halfway through, and then grabbing the next..." - this is to prevent multiple persons on jumping the same task, that's your daily planning.
3. "Waiting for the daily stand-up is a terrible way to deal with impediments." - again, nobody forces you to wait for a standup to deal with problems that arise, this is used to explain why were you spending so much time on fixing some small bug. For example - you spent whole day trying to fix a bug, but the fix itself was a "one-liner". After looking to your commit I could make a false assumption that you were slacking the whole day and only made a single "change" where on a standup you have time to explain what problems forced you to spent whole day on tracking down that bug... Another example - someone spends whole day on a feature but still doesn't finish that even though it's trivial to implement, he might either explain that he faced a problems that prevented him from implementing that feature faster or he won't have anything to say because he was slacking