True, I do conflate the two. But the article was about hashrate, and you do need enormous hashrate to modify even one past block. Attacks of that kind are fairly unreasonable, even on the scale of the Chinese govt.
Would I be wrong to think that every miner (or at least every entity who is mining, not nessesarily every computer that is mining) would have a vested interest in running a full node as well? That would put control of the nodes in roughly the same hands as those who control the miners right?