The article you linked argues for a change in the way multiplication is explained to children, not the way it is defined.

> Telling students falsehoods on the assumption that they can be corrected later is rarely a good idea. And telling them that multiplication is repeated addition definitely requires undoing later.

I disagree. Understanding multiplication as repeated addition has always been an invaluable intuition, especially in the beginning, where explicit calculations are important. The biggest hurdle when introducing multiplication is getting them to understand the multiplication table. The fact that it is defined as a separate operation in the definition of ring/field is almost irrelevant in the pedagogical context, just as we don't start teaching real numbers with Dedekind cuts.