That's a literal ~ in your path, the exact problem the blog post talks about.

Your use doesn't count as a "word", per man bash. Tilde is only expanded to home at the start of a typically whitespace-separated word, and your tilde is in the middle of one.

> If a word begins with an unquoted tilde character (‘~’), all of the characters up to the first unquoted slash (…) are considered a tilde-prefix. (…)

> word A sequence of characters considered as a single unit by the shell. Also known as a token.