The article makes the distinction, because it's a useful empirical distinction to draw :). While you're correct that linux is, strictly-speaking, an endpoint-de

The article makes the distinction, because it's a useful empirical distinction to draw :). While you're correct that linux is, strictly-speaking, an endpoint-dependent implementation, it goes to sufficient effort to reuse mappings in an endpoint-independent way that you can do useful things against it by treating it as an EIM NAT. Similarly, commercial systems like JunOS try to stick to EIM behavior for as long as they can, and only shift to EDM behavior when load makes it infeasible to do otherwise. There again, strictly speaking that means you should abandon all hope... But in practice, NAT traversal still works much more often than not, and we can use that to build useful systems while we wait for IPv6 adoption to continue.