It depends on how much you care about your knife. If its a cheapish german knife with soft steel and you dont care about grinding off a lot of steel, electric sharpeners are fine. When you get into super hard and thin japanese steels in the 61-65HRC range, they tend to chip the blade just due to the edge geometry, and you have no control over your knife edge angle.

That NYT article fully misunderstands knife sharpening and its there to sell a product. A few passes on a single diamond stone ($50 bucks) followed by a leather strop ($15) to remove the burr will bring any knife, any steel to a razor edge without needing water or any other complex setups.

I fully get that most people don't want to spending the time to learn to sharpen a knife (probably takes 4 or 5 hours of practice to get good on a shit knife) and dont want to invest in a set of stones they'll use once a year at most. But if you have 1 good stone and just use it on your knife for 2 minutes every month you'll never have a dull edge. Hell if you replaced a hone with a strop with diamond compound sprayed onto it and stropped it for 60 seconds every week it will never go dull.

Rant aside - I highly recommend the spyderco sharpmaker for anybody want to sharpen knifes without learning to use a stone. Nearly impossible to mess up and it doesnt destroy your edges.