To say I'm annoyed would be very much overstating it, just a (very minor) eye-roll at one small line in a generally very good article. Just the bit quoted:
currency symbols other than the $ (kind of tells you who invented computers, doesn’t it?)
So they could also be attributing it to some other country that uses $ for their currency, which is a few, but it seems most likely to be suggesting USD.
But then for that you have distrobox, which is great. If that's not enough, running another OS is also trivial, so that downside really is only 'kinda', as you say!