Author of the article here. As far as I care, if it quacks like a hashmap, it's better to describe it as a hashmap. The fact that it's an associative array under the hood is irrelevant.
A hashmap is a very specific structure that uses a hashing algorithm to normalize the key sizes, and then usually constructs a tree-like structure for fast key lookups. Anything that doesn't use such an implementation under the hood should not be called a hashmap, whether you care or not.
For reference the main implementations of associative array are alists/plists (linear time), balanced binary trees, b-trees (logarithmic time) and hash maps (amortised constant time).