Maybe I'm confused but on my Debian system this works _exactly_ as expected. Yes /etc/motd is a symlink to /var/run/motd and removing said symlink, or replacing

Maybe I'm confused but on my Debian system this works _exactly_ as expected. Yes /etc/motd is a symlink to /var/run/motd and removing said symlink, or replacing it with something causes either the new message to show or there to be no motd. Is the author just confusing Debian and Ubuntu or am I missing something? Why do people keep doing this? Just because Ubuntu behaves in a specific way does not mean that Debian behaves the same.