Anybody else find this bigoted?

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Point 4 is bigoted, and I think Point 2 is wrong - illiterate people definitely exist, even if they're pretty rare in the developed world.

Did you miss this part?

Sadly not as rare as you might think.

In my latest psych class, the prof said that if you count being illiterate not as 'unable to read at all' but as 'unable to read well enough to do the tasks a typical adult in the Western world needs to do', it's about a third of the population of Canada, and higher in the US. (Very much correlated with socioeconomic class and ethnic minority status, as well as community you live in, so that's why many middle-class people rarely meet an illiterate adult.)

I do think most middle-class kids would learn to read eventually without formal education. (Dyslexia and other disabilities being an exception, of course.) However, if your parents are mostly illiterate themselves, and your community has a very low literacy rate (I heard of one neighborhood where only 8% of the adults could read), there really isn't much opportunity for a kid to learn to read outside of school. Incidentally, this is the main purpose of Sesame Street. But a single TV show can't solve the whole problem - we need to make sure these kids have access to appropriate good-quality schooling. Unfortunately, so many times the kids who need school the most end up attending underfunded, overcrowded, poorly-run schools, because who cares about them anyway?

I agree with BuyerBeware.

The passage is saying that if too much brain energy (or whatever) is spent on reading, it is a missed opportunity to use that energy to train social interaction. This is not saying that the reading is causing autism, the autism is already there. But rather that the brain development stages at that age would be better used to "compensate" for the autism. I disagree with this

NT kids teach themselves to read?
Not judging by the fact that every single one of my NT students gets near a piano, gets told "the keys are in alphabetical order", and instantly forgets what the first 7 letters of the alphabet are.
Never had that problem with my autistic students.