Yes, the overlap between privacy conscious people and deliberately non GMS users are very big.
I read the article because I was interested how they would do it, and how I can disable it. I was just disappointed, that there is no magic, just lazy tech writers are mixing up different things again.
I’m so old that I remember when youtube raised the upload limit from 10 to 15 minutes for all videos in 2010. Now the length of a Short is a third of what a Long video was originally.