As a former smoker I think you didn't fully read the article und understood author's and other's thesis that it is actually not the nicotine that makes for the strong cigarette addiction.
My experience is that nicotine is highly addictive based on dosage and delivery.
Cigars were in no way addictive, I suspect because the delivery of the nicotine takes quite a while.
The zyn though, I quickly ramped up from low dosages (1-3mg) to the higest dosages (10mg+). And at my worst I'd go through a 20 pack of those per day.
I tried quitting cold turkey multiple times from the zyn, failed each time. Tried slowly decreasing strength till I reached 3mg and then quit, that worked fine and was actually relatively easy.
I still smoke cigars, they just don't trigger the same reactions that the zyn did.
For more fine grained decreases I've used the 3mg, then 2mg, then split up pieces of nicotine gum (2 or 4 mg) to get down to like 1 and .5 mg doses.
Going from 3mg to no longer using was relatively straightforward.
Trying to quit from 10mg cold turkey was basically impossible. 4 days after going cold turkey I was still absolutely desperate for nicotine. The difference was massive.
Nicotine is the chemical that causes this, but the addiction is far more than just nicotine alone.
What a shortsighted and close minded comment (talking about parent).
Or in other words: Why do people only get little addicted and can easily stop chewing nicotin gums, while for only a small percentage of smokers it is possible to quit via the nicotin gum replacement?
Or in even other words: Both coffeine and heroine are addictive, but we can agree that there are differences?