One thing the article doesn't mention is how this changes the final time to have all people processed. Wouldn't this result in (for example) flights leaving later, if people were in competition to arrive last?
There's a real-world variation. At some airports people at the terminal go into a bus, which then takes them to a plane. This serves to mix and somewhat invert the queue, since the last people on the bus become the first to enter the plane.
The question I have is, is there a change in the gate queuing behavior between flights that load directly at the gate, vs. one where people first enter a bus?
It's even more obvious when the neighboring gates also use buses.
In the airline example, the airline wants passengers to be at the gate before they begin boarding so that they can start looking for missing passengers as early as possible. I think we see this technique most often used by low cost carriers, and this is one of the many ways that they are able to turn aircraft around so quickly.