Valve is making untold millions on people gambling for items in the game itself. They're looking the other way as secondary markets allow for monetization. I respect Valve as a game maker, but I have no respect for this extremely dubious, gray-market gambling. Claiming that the article is "dishonest" when Valve is one of the largest beneficiaries of this seems dubious.
It's also worth noting that this is very real money. I can put $70 on my Steam account and buy a new triple-A game....or in the land of Valve I can sell some skins and buy the game. It is trading things in CS:GO for real world value, so comparisons to closed-systems (throughout this thread) seems deeply suspect. I can also use that CS:GO loot to "gift" a new game to a friend who then pays me in the real world. And so on.