No picture you see is exactly what came out of the camera. As the author points out at the end of the article, if your camera outputs a jpg image, then it's already made its own decisions of how to manipulate the raw data.

You can't even see what comes out of an image sensor. The raw sensor data inevitable requires interpretation to turn it into a human-viewable image, and there exists no single canonical interpretation. That can happen in the camera, or later in a separate software, but there's no way around it.

I think the discrepancy lies between "this scene never happened" and "this scene was never witnessed by the human eye as such".

I think one of the expectations of a photograph can be to be a reproduction of a scene as it was witnessed, not as it happened. That is, as the photographer was shooting the volcano, he never beheld the Milky way and the sea of light from the valleys that way, that only appeared in post-production.

I don't necessarily think it's fake to prettify an image [1], but I can imagine why some people would consider it less than real.

1. "Pillars of Creation" looks awe inspiring in spite of: "The blue colors in the image represent oxygen, red is sulfur, and green represents both nitrogen and hydrogen."