Oh yeah, some of those were crazy in that article, but also so are some of the newer things that I notice.
My oldest son's baby had this little rash under her neck where the drool and milk got and he asked me what to do. I put corn starch on her right there and the mother went ballistic. Screamed at me to not put crazy things on her baby because powder is horrible and it gets in their lungs, etc.
Every generation has their own things that they freak out about that the previous generation thinks is nuts, at least that's what I think. I remember babyproofing everything after my first baby was born, and thinking how wrong my mother was not not have done that for me. Of course I wasn't actually thinking about the fact that I was taught not to mess with those things in the first place.
But, back to the stuff from the past ideas. I remember as a child having an earrache, my grandfather would blow smoke in my ear. When I had a stomach ache or they just wanted me to be quiet and go to sleep, I would get paragoric. I remember school paddlings, playgrounds that were nothing more than 3000 degree sheet metal baking in the sun that sat on hard, hot asphalt and we played on it in shorts and barefoot. Everyone's parents had a gun and it was usually kept in plain sight, you never touched it though. Ever. Everybody smoked, everywhere, all the time. It was rude to complain about it. When a baby was teething, you rubbed whiskey on it's gums to numb it. You had to give a newborn catnip tea to make it "hive" and "get all the poison out". A suntan was a sign of health and a suburn just meant you hadn't gotten used to the sun yet that year.
One day our grandkids and great grandkids will look back at us and say how reckless we all were for not doing <whatever new thing they come up with>
Time marches on, we can't stop it.