The Chinese language has different articles depending on what noun it is for. So 一杯可乐 versus 一双筷子.

In German there are three genders of articles that are basically randomly assigned to each noun.

Sometimes these make sense, but not always, and with languages you have to learn arbitrary information.

It feels like the original post is disparaging American English for not using arbitrary nouns for collections of things. As with most differences between American and British English, the American version is simpler and loses very little. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯