To be fair, a whole lot of players don't do the painting side of things. It's very common for people to field unpainted minis, or commission paint jobs if they really care about having them painted.
Because the tldr of the article is that the authors' specific definition of fanaticism involving investment of hundreds of hours on side tasks like painting individual units is considered based and epic and totally not a collection of junk, and that other solutions involved around not doing things like that are actually not based and not epic and are totally big collections of junk
It's sort of weird because the issue isn't around proxies representing a figure in another form, but about the perceived "loss" of the value of their efforts from someone popping out something identical without wastin- spending as much time. "I do it, so I value it" is an interesting life code to live by.
