I believe the authors point was not that pagination was bad, but the built in pagination in rails was bad/hacky/expensive, and that you should write your own instead of using the built in one (or something along those lines). If you look at the top level of his blog you'll find a respose to the feedback he got.
http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2006/08/30/on-the-days-events
To quote:
"Pagination seems to be the issue we pulled apart today so let's talk about that for a few minutes. I said some things about pagination that, after returning to them, seem a bit cryptic. Sorry about that. Let me clarify: the built in pagination helpers are a hackish pain. They're hard to work with and have some efficiency issues. As a result, working with very large data sets can cause it problems. Don't be afraid, just be aware. With large data sets you'll want to roll your own. The Paginator object itself isn't so bad (though we really should clean it up) and I prefer to use custom pagination with it over the helpers.
That being said, we've talked about pulling out the Rails pagination helpers into a plugin for a while. I imagine they were brought up when I passed the article around was for that reason. It isn't deprecated yet, but it probably will be."
Alan
