I agree that I don't agree either.
I browsed and immediately disagreed here: “It wasn’t until the space shuttle came along that it was possible to consider building a space station as a series of building blocks.”
Salyut was already moving in that direction and Mir was built as it was also because Proton was the biggest launch vehicle the Soviets had.
But America didn't have to do that. I think the United State's generous and unwanted gift of Skylab to the people of the Australian outback was one of the stupidest decisions made in space policy. It still bothers me, and I know i am not alone, that people wander through Skylab II at the NASM thinking it's some kind of mockup or display. Nope, that's unflown space hardware. That's America's second large space station, and it could have been launched on one of the Saturn V's people chose to abandon outside Marshall and Johnson instead of flying so they could concentrate politically on STS and Apollo-Soyuz.
Skylab should have been saved. Skylab II should have been flown. By the time we needed a Skylab III, Shuttle-C would have been a heavy-lift option for building the next one from the lessons learned from the previous two. And that's the sad part, those lessons had to wait decades. Skylab needed its orbit boosted, needed an increase in solar power capacity, as well as a docking module, but all those things would have been good lessons to learn anyway, and certainly were in the capacity for NASA once Shuttle was running . Of course Shuttle delays and an unexpectedly strong solar weather surge meant Skylab was coming down early, but I still maintain it could have been saved by sending up one of the remaining Apollo CM's and boosting it's orbit via the Service module, just enough to keep it up there a few more years.
By the time that ISS building began in orbit, with the shelving of the US Propulsion Module, NASA was at least unwilling to hedge those kinds of bets since it was now entirely reliant on the Russians and the occasional Shuttle reboost (not many of the latter, lately) and the ICM remains in mothball status just in case it is needed. So. one lesson learned at least.
