I have a bone to pick with this article.

First of all the security at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport did partially stop the attackers.
At least one of them was shot by security before detonating his suicide vest.

When you have 3 suicide bombers that attack a fixed target like an Airport for the most part you can only minimize casualties and while it's hard to admit it 41 deaths is low compared to what can happen in these kinds of situations (Israel in the early 2000's shows you just how many casualties a single suicide bomber can incur).

The whole idea of layered security (often modeled after the Ben Gurion Airport) is to reduce lines you have finer and finer security checkpoints at each layer this increases the attackers being caught while reduces the population density at the external checkpoints.

Ben Gurion goes further than that and it has incorporated security to how it was built, there is a hairpinned roads ~5min drive from the external security checkpoint to the terminal building (preventing anyone from just rushing pass the checkpoint).

The check in counters and the initial security screening is done over a very wide area in order to not to create choke points.

Passengers are pre-screened before they enter the security checkpoint which really doesn't care about liquids, shoes, or nail scissors.

From the passport control to the main lounge you have quite a long walk through a corridor which has no shops or any thing to gather around just some photographs this again is an anti-rushing measure if some one passes security and decides to rush the gates they are pretty much funneled through a tunnel.

The main terminal lounge is fairly small compared to other airports (even of the size of TLV or smaller) it's round with a large fountain in the middle and with fairly low density seating.

The gates are clustered over several branches and are separated from the main terminal lounge again by another fairly long defacto tunnel without any shops which again gives security the ability to close off any of them and prevents basically a leap frog rush.

There will always be choke points and clusters in an airport or any other public area, the airline counters, the check in desks, the information counter, restaurants, restrooms, the duty free liquor/tobacco store etc and of course the boarding gates.
And of course even the most lax security check that is intended to do nothing but to ensure you don't have an RPG in your bags would create them as well.

Good security is built around performing as much checks as possible before the people are centralized in one place and cluster, good security is about building the airports in such a manner that would enable security to react promptly while reducing the effectiveness of both armed assaults and suicide attacks.

So no security doesn't make you less safe sure intelligence and enforcement is still better than securing an airport but that's a given you don't need to analyze anything to come to that conclusion simply because even the most ideal attack on a target like an airport would have some casualties even if it's the assailants only.

Claiming that somehow security makes you less safe is moronic, this to some extent even includes the TSA which isn't an effective security measure but it doesn't makes you less safe.
The lines and clusters would still be there regardless of security or not they'll just be at different places.