It's less about sales being a difficult medium to respect.

There might be more about the people and the behaviour they are choosing. Like anything it has to be managed, because it's only a sale when the customer is satisfied to retain the sale, let alone renew.

Getting good at helping qualified leads can be just fine.

If inbound is garbage, it invites less than ideal behaviour.

tbf, this is to sales what "I developed a shell script that automatically appends extended comments and now I'm the highest line-of-code outputting developer in my cheap IT outsourcing company" is to software development....

It varies to be honest, the one in the article - telemarketing, or broader speaking, selling something they don't need to someone - is scummy. But when working in IT you have to make a decision on a solution, be it a library, a service, or something like that; the role of sales becomes more difficult then, and will involve presentations, live demos, POCs, etc.