Yes but I see no point in using fixed length string fields. Double so for the examples the article gives (first and last names). All the times I've encountered

Yes but I see no point in using fixed length string fields. Double so for the examples the article gives (first and last names). All the times I've encountered them has been with legacy systems ands it's been a universal pain. All your front end code ends up doing TRIM(...) to clean them up the extra padding. Modern RDBMSs all handle variable length fields efficiently so it's a waste of programmer time to have to deal with CHAR/NCHAR fields.