> the author is trying to reconcile two fundamentally irreconcilable ways of looking at memory: on the one hand, the machine view of a single address space, and on the other, the program view of distinct variables

That's not incorrect. However, the reason I am doing that is because this is what C is all about (nowadays, at least): Compilers doing high-level optimizations based on alias analysis and other sources, and programmers expecting to have a low-level picture of memory.

Our choice is to either give up and declare C broken beyond repair, or try to find some way to reconcile these two worlds as best as possible.