That article is almost entirely about how it's useless to encode audio at excessive sample rates and bit rates beyond the human ear's capacities—not about lossy compression. It does claim that modern lossy compressors are good enough, but admits that there can be reason to prefer lossless distribution since there is then no need to trust the distributor to use a good encoder with correct settings.
Yes. The point is not about that distributor can fail to use a good encoder (anything can happen), but that they can use a good one if they want to, and audible result will be the same as lossless.
When I buy music, I always try to buy it in lossless FLACs anyway. And then I encode it to Opus for playback. But for listening to something on-line, Opus would do just fine to begin with.
