Cite? My vague understanding of how vision works is that your brain will tend to interpolate over missing data rather than perceive it as black. So you need to actually test whether you can discriminate things in the affected field of view.
He reports it looking like a visible hole with surrounding distortion. Apparently similar to some renderings of black holes.
That said, this is a large defect in the centre of vision - it's pretty much un-interpolatable.
I understand smaller defects not in the macula just get interpolated away.
I have this spot in my right eye that resembles dead pixels. Just tiny blackness. If I let my eyes try to focus on it, it moves with my eyeball, so then they try to focus on the new location... ad infinitum. So they sort of jitter on a path upwards and to the right. I can only see it in certain lighting.
Eye doctor couldn't see anything wrong with the area and suggested it might be a floater that got attached and would go away on its own within 6mo. That was 4yr ago and it's still around. It's not getting worse so it doesn't bother me, it just reminds me of the saa from the Wheel of Time.
I would have expected interpolation versus vision artifacts as well, but apparently that's an "only sometimes" thing.
The mechanism isn't perfect and there are plenty of scenarios where your brain doesn't fill in the information, like the one I described. You also see it when looking at repeating patterns. It isn't something super obvious and if you choose to ignore it, it mostly goes away.
If your brain magically filled in the missing part of your vision in all cases, ask yourself how we would ever know that anyone has any amount of damage to their vision. Obviously we do know, since people talk about it. There must be some mechanism by which the damage becomes apparent to the patient.