If anything the article gives Apple unjustifiable benefit of doubt. Apple exempts itself fron the IDFA transparency requirements it imposes on third-party app developers, and has drawn legal scrutiny in France and the EU, among others:

https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...

Then there is their scanning of iCloud backups for CSAM without being forced to do so by law, something Meta hasn't done with WhatsApp, and obviously not Signal either. CSAM today, messages critical of the powers that be tomorrow, they breached a fundamental ethical line in end-to-end encryption and they are thus now completely untrustworthy on encryption.

Apple's marketing is very effective, but the idea that they are any better than the other Big Tech firms on privacy is just that, marketing fluff without substance if you dig but a little. None of them can be trusted. At this point the only way to really protect your privacy is to connect to the Internet using a MiFI or similar router running open-source software and implementing an outbound firewall blocklist like Jordan Geoghegan's unbound-adblock:

https://geoghegan.ca//unbound-adblock.html