Disabling HTML e-mails does not sound particularly unreasonable. There’s little additional benefit from them but a whole host of possible issues, least of all that suddenly your e-mail client has to deal with properly parsing HTML and you have to decide whether or not to load remote images and potentially execute JavaScript.
I've never read my email in HTML, mostly for security reasons such as this incident. For the rare occasion where an email doesn't render correctly, Thunderbird's "Show HTML" button works a charm.
Have I been able to convince a single customer (I run a computer services business) or friend to follow my lead? Nope, not a single one.
The article clearly explains that "the bitly link was not directly visible in the phishing email, as it was an HTML-email."