Some of this article reads like a criticism of people's second-hand impressions of the books. Their poverty and Pa's poor decisions that made it worse are right there in the books, they're just told from the perspective of a child who loves her father and doesn't know a different life.

Whether the real-life Laura is like the one in the book is kind of interesting, I guess, but anyone who didn't pick up on how poor they were and how little success they had at farming from the books was reading them superficially.