For one thing, it ignores that the calorie consumer has feelings. First, running a calorie deficit makes you physiologically hungry. You can fight the hunger, but no willpower or strength of character is going to make it disappear. Going on a diet is a constant fight against your body. And that doesn't even get into the psychological reasons people eat. Articles like this one make no effort to account for this. They don't explore the negative effects. Being hungry all the time is really fucking distracting. And they certainly don't try to weigh those downsides against the potential benefits.
And those benefits to dieting are very much "potential". Study after study has shown that diets don't work in the long term; people usually gain the weight back. The article smarmily dismisses metabolism as a factor. But losing weight slows your metabolism down. You end up needing to cut you intake even further than someone who's been steady at the same weight [1].
I've been fat and I've lost weight. My maximum weight exceeded my minimum (post-max) weight by about 100 pounds. Right now I'm somewhere in the middle. To the extend that I've had sustained weight loss, it has been by making gradual, sustainable changes to my lifestyle. And these changes haven't used weight as a target. Getting into running, replacing some foods with other foods, and working on my mental health are all fairly sustainable in their own right. They make me feel better and healthier. The correlated weight loss is incidental. When I did use weight as a target, I did more harm than good. Exercising and dieting to the point of passing out for a whole day after a long run did make me lose weight, but it didn't make me healthier. In fact, my running got slower.
Leave fat people the fuck alone about their diets. The panopticon of shame and ridicule doesn't help.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/88/4/906/4650207?login...