Only by a weird definition of "scalable". The first sentence says:

> Counterintuitively, large DELETEs add work to the database.

There is nothing counterintuitive about this. It takes just as much work to delete a row as it takes to insert a row. Why wouldn't it? Obviously you have to do almost all the same operations: write a log, write the deletion, update indices, replicate it, etc.

And yes, it's a well-known trick for all major relational databases (not just Postgres) that if you want to delete 90% of rows from a large a table, it's much faster to just copy the rows you want to keep to a new table, run DROP TABLE on the old table, and rename the new table to the old table. Since DROP TABLE is ~instantaneous, mainly involving table-level metadata.

DELETE scales just fine, in the sense that if you are constantly inserting and deleting individual rows, DELETE scales the same as INSERT.

Basic database functionality is designed around the assumption of lots of small transactions. Whenever you have to do something involving millions of rows at once, you generally need to investigate solutions that work well in "bulk". E.g. loading rows directly from a file rather than with SQL, adding indices only after the data has been loaded rather than before, disabling foreign key checks on large operations (if you know by design that the keys are valid)... and yes, taking advantage of DROP TABLE instead of DELETE. This doesn't mean small transactions aren't scalable, it just means bulk operations are qualitatively different and benefit from their own solutions. And DELETE is no different from INSERT in this regard.