I can acknowledge that, but in a different way. The website where I present my artwork has no cookies or anything close to trackers whatsoever, all on purpose. But the big whammy I had this year was when I quit Facebook as my daily outlet advertising for my site. Within a month my unique visitor count tripled and last month I even had another grow-sprint of about 23%. :-)
There are only two things connected to other sites and those are my SEO (just keywords, no scripting) and one link to my Instagram-profile. That's all.
Considering the fact that most social media promise a lot of visitors to your site and lots of people fall for that, a strong belief started to exist that it is beneficiary for the advertisers, which is, in my case, absolutely not true. And thus I side with this article, because it clearly shows that social media is absolutely not needed to facilitate a nice website with lots of unique visitors.
Social media like Facebook keeps your advertisement and posts linked to your website under hefty control and show it only to people whenever it suits them or their algorithm. That's what bugged me in the first place and after six months of running my site the way it does now, I wholeheartedly can advise anyone who wants more unique visitors to their site (and build up a clientele consisting of people outside the tiny "social-media-bubble") to try the same as I did.
Also: people take me and my artwork way more seriously after that simple, but effective solution. As if Facebook and the likes makes you look like an amateur, which it actually does with their bloated and, dare I say, badly designed sites.