I'm confused. The article apparently thinks that it's fine to favorite something you don't actually think is your favorite, contra twitter. But then why not heart something you don't actually like? The logic doesn't seem to work out.
(I sometimes use them as "read receipts" because I am excessively social and this causes me serious problems online. Faving something tells the person who wrote it that I saw it without me having to actually talk to them. This reconciles my need to communicate with my need to reduce the degree to which my chattiness routinely used to make me the center of some shitshow for reasons beyond my ability to fathom.)
Chrome doesn't even use the term favorites. It uses the (more accurate, imo) term bookmarks.