> TL;DR: Yes. You have to pay for Java now.

You have to pay for Oracle JDK but not for OpenJDK, which is just as good, except for a less business-friendly license, no commercial support, and no LTS builds straight from Oracle (instead you need to put your bets on adoptopenjdk.net).

> Quoting the article: «Oracle JDKs may only be used in production if you buy the commercial support.»

Yes, but the author forgets about this in the "What does the new release train mean to my company?" section and draws completely wrong conclusions.

> The alternative is using OpenJDK in production. We'll have to see how much the Oracle JDK and OpenJDK will diverge.

They will be identical. All of Oracle's JDK work, even LTS related work, will go into the OpenJDK repo.