The OP article talks about people met online who they subsequently met and hung out with in person. To me, this is now an meatspace friendship, so yeah, it's "real".

Pure online relationships where you have never met or seen the other person are in my experience an order of magnitude less "real". As you note, there's no 'skin in the game' and ghosting a relationship is zero effort and likely zero consequences, and when everyone knows this is the case the relationships are equally less consequential.