It's kind of like complaining that if you want to have foobar.tld for every top-level domain, you have to fork out money to every TLD registrar to make it possible.
555-abcd, sans area code, would just work and route to you no matter where (in the USA) a caller was calling from.
Therefore it is equivalent to having that number in every area code.
Now there is a good chance you aren’t old enough to know/remember this, but people in the US didn’t have to dial an area code (and occasionally nearby area codes) when calling people in their own area code. In the era of land lines this was the norm.
You paid a lot of money per minute to call people “long distance” in other area codes.
Now it’s absolutely normal and routine to dial with an area code, in large part because people’s numbers follow them around and there is no reason to think someone geographically near you is in the same area code.
Paying $2500 per area code is unreasonable, as, like I said, there is nothing inherently special about 206-555-1234 vs 206-689-5312.
Even the article points out that it was difficult and expensive to maintain, why is it unreasonable to charge proportionally to that, or indeed whatever the small number of people wanting it will actually pay?
Let's be real, we're all tech engineers here. Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop. There's nothing at all special about maintaining one mapping vs another.
But I don’t have any domain knowledge here, so this is really just a guess
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All I know about telecoms comes from Wikipedia, but that makes no sense. Why would the technology that determines where to route your call be related to the protocol used to transfer data long distances?
(Also the Verizon quote is from 2003.)
It might have cost 2500 per area code when that was a requirement and you had to set these up loops up manually across longer distances, but nowadays it literally is just going to be a mapping in a computer, like any other.