Sure you can. Fingerprint of key is just a shorter and more convenient option to reference key everywhere, including manual verification. Article tells just tha

Sure you can. Fingerprint of key is just a shorter and more convenient option to reference key everywhere, including manual verification. Article tells just that and it's commonly used in the industry. And, by the way, signature in X.509 certificates ("TLS certificates") also hashes data to be signed - signed data input has to be smaller than sig size. Hence it also verifies pubkey indirectly.