I agree with the general thrust of the article in that iteration time is one of the most important factors of any kind of creative work, programming included. The longer you go without feedback or corrections, the less confident you can be that you're on the "right track."

That said, build systems and VCS aren't the only ways to optimize the process. For example, a system using scripts processed at runtime lets you reduce the amount of compiled code and iterate quickly on the one section by pressing a "reload script" button, or, even more conveniently, monitoring the source file and auto-reloading when changes are saved. If you're daring enough you could probably even do this with machine-compiled languages by abusing dynamic linking, though the ease of doing that would ultimately depend on the runtime linker capabilities.

Doing this kind of data-driven thing will cost runtime performance since less can be compiled and optimized statically, but if you treat it as the "scaffolding" work that it is and also include ways to reclaim some of the static factors for release builds, you can get a better overall result than you would if you were just suffering through long builds.