I commented this because I find it does relate to your point - in my view, you have identified a false motivation/incorrect user story.
By my understanding, this is exactly what the parent article is identifying as potentially damaging.
Quote from the article: "User stories are time-consuming to write and read and can silo engineers into a mechanical role where they code to the issue requirements instead of thinking about the user experience holistically at the product level."
So let's negotiate the true value? How else are you going to know if you're delivering technology thats useful?
You said there are other reasons, what are those reason? I've gone to restaurants to meet friends... and ultimately we all eat to satisfy our hunger.
My point is that tasks are derived from functional requirements, they aren't context free, and if you make them context free then we're just doing what ever we want? To analogise, why do you have relationships in databases and indexes? An index is a flat map to speed up lookups on known queries, you don't get at the meat of your query in the index, the meat of what you want is in the row and it's relationships. You have an object graph for a reason, and yeah it was the hard part, but it's what makes a model useful.
... and to counter the quote... What's the point of your users experience if it's not to get them to where they are deriving value?
By my understanding, this is exactly what the parent article is identifying as potentially damaging.
Quote from the article: "User stories are time-consuming to write and read and can silo engineers into a mechanical role where they code to the issue requirements instead of thinking about the user experience holistically at the product level."