This is very much a personal thing and the article is only showing one end of the spectrum. While I have issues staying up past 48 hours and my longest ever stint was 56 or so, I can go for 36 hours easily without any real dramatic adverse effects. I certainly don't feel drunk and am quite capable of performing complicated work even after 24 hours of being awake.

As long as the sun is up my body generally wants to be awake and when going for long periods of uptime I only have an issue with tiredness between 2am and 4am. After 4am I can convince myself that the sun will be up soon and once I can actually see the sky brighten I become energized rapidly.

The one time I did go past 48 hours I never hallucinated but simply felt like a zombie. My mind basically shut off and I felt very detached and remote to my own consciousness. The odd thing is that when I finally got into bed it still took me something like 2 hours to finally fall asleep because I felt too tired to actually fall asleep.

Anyway, that's my experience. When I read through the article I kept thinking it was missing the mark for me completely.