Hmm, think you're taking the title of the article a little too literally, and focusing on just the "data type" aspect. Yeah, the article itself indirectly agree

Hmm, think you're taking the title of the article a little too literally, and focusing on just the "data type" aspect. Yeah, the article itself indirectly agrees with you that pointers are often how graphs are implemented: "Graphs are a generalization of linked lists, binary trees, and hash tables," which are data-structures often implemented by pointers. Yeah, the article is really saying what you're saying, that building a graph library ("tooling") is very complicated. But, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying??