That stuff really has no place in a healthy diet. It’s is indeed highly processed and mainly designed for taste and texture. If you want to go vegetarian stay away from things that try to emulate meat. That’s not a good path. Instead look at real vegetarian dishes that stand in their own . Indian cuisine is full of them for example. Italian cooking also has lots of them.

Those vegan burger patties are explicitly a replacement for regular patties, which are also pretty ultraprocessed (esp. when you consider what goes into the cow before its meat gets ground down).

Sure, I agree but that's not a whole foods plant-based diet anyway (which is what the article is actually relating to).