If this guy has a hard time killing animals with a .270, I don't think you can blame the cartridge.

The article is just a wind up to get attention. But he doesn't even have his facts straight for a start. The 7x57 was quite popular for a period interwar in the States, cheap surplus rifles were available, right when the .270 was coming of age. It was later due to the war that 7mm became foreign and German and lost ground.

And you cannot put the success of the .270 onto a single gunwriter. Jack O'Connor was popular in his time, and the .270 was indeed his favourite cartridge. He said as much, demonstrated it, (took it on several safaris to Africa, and also India, and many other countries) and it comes through in his writing. But he didn't get the .270 bug seriously until around 1938 and didn't become a full-time writer until 1945. The .270 was well regarded and written about by others also influential; editors like Monroe Goode and writers like Townsend Whelen.
The .270 became popular because it was successful. You can't talk a dead duck into life. (Thats a saying I just coined.)

Honestly if you have trouble shooting little whitetails with a .270 and finding them again...it means you can't shoot deer right. I killed red three deer with a black powder .44/40 this year, none of them went twenty feet. Deer are not hard to kill.

In NZ when the Army stopped releasing .303's and ammo to the deer cullers,the NZ Forest Service had to decide on an updated cartridge to become government issue for deer culling. These men had several thousand red deer on their tally's each. They decided on the .270 Winchester* and they had ammo manufactured with their own headstamp. NZFS .270.

(*They also issued .222 Remington - but that just goes to illustrate my point that deer are not hard to kill.)