That really has nothing to do with what processors do not currently provide. As the headlined article explains, Intel CPUs have had instructions that can point to individual bits for donkey's years. The second operand to BTS (for example) is a bit address.

std::vector<bool> was its own special Hell, because it was invented as a way to try to expose what processors could do, instead of every compiler vendor having its own set of processor-specific intrinsics. Which meant, as Scott Meyers famously said, that it was not a standard container and it didn't contain any actual bools.

The world has long since come up with replacements. There are non-container bit vectors in C++, now, such as std::bitset and boost::dynamic_bitset.