The article (not the NYT one, which is just typical whiney urban cat lady trash) has a lot of the components of a marketing submarine. Particularly obviously as .... well, who is this person?
I do think apps are pretty helpful in stuffing vocab in the brain. Mixed bag though. Duolingo is shit for me; they don't have continental Portuguese (Memrise does). The rest of it rings true as well (I listen to Portuguese radio at home to work on my understanding when I'm not being a slug).
Living in France will not teach you French, besides "survival French" and probably "minimal conversational French". Even having a French partner won't help at all, unless you both commit to speaking French (and then your partner is put into a weird position where they're your partner but have to constantly correct you)...
Acquiring Superior/Distinguished [0] level vocabulary basically entails dense vocabulary study, daily. And then putting it into practice with usage and recognition (i.e. reading French books). Anything else is far too slow.
> When I try to tell a story in French, I sense that the listener wants to flee.
The hardest part of learning any language is just accepting that you're going to make mistakes. Maybe French people are more snobbish about French (I have no idea) but generally speaking... people understand that you're taking the time and effort to learn and speak their language.
s/French/<Your Desired Language>/g
I know people who have lived in Korea for 5, 8, 10 years and are frankly still terrible at it. Some of these people own businesses there! Having a bilingual Korean partner is probably the worst thing that I noticed, because you end up always speaking the language that's more convenient, i.e. English.
[0]: https://www.languagetesting.com/actfl-proficiency-scale
I have a low opinion of NYT columnists. As you say, you really have to work at it. Reading the peregrinations of someone who admitted they didn't actually work at it, larded with excuses from psychologists (who are measuring people who also didn't work at it) isn't real edifying or useful; we already know how people manage not to do it. Enough people succeed in learning new languages as adults, I'd rather hear from them.