This is indeed the key distinction - the author did strictly refer to CI, and for that their argument works, but that's essentially strawmanning as IMHO most pe

This is indeed the key distinction - the author did strictly refer to CI, and for that their argument works, but that's essentially strawmanning as IMHO most people who are using CI don't care about "pure CI", they want (and get) CI/CD from "CI tools" so CI/CD is the actual thing that should be compared with build systems.