Correcting myself: I was thinking of a different can apparently. That 12% ABV can mentioned in the article corresponds to 4.4 shots of vodka (using standard US 1.5 oz shots of 80 proof vodka.)

As someone from a country where when you ask for a drink, you get like 3x as much vodka as you would in the UK or US, when I was young I typically drank vodka with lemon soda, but when I lived in the UK I switched to vodka red bull. The reasoning was "so little vodka does nothing so let's see if at least the red bull does something" which was at least partially true, although still didn't make up for the lost alcohol content with respect to what I was used to :) Back to my place, I stopped having vodka red bull except very infrequently to remember those times, but here, with serious amounts of vodka, it's quite a bomb.

I've never seen these energy beers (not sure if they were even sold in my country or countries where I lived) but I might have liked them.

The author must have just been trying to be cute, because yes, they were never referred to as energy beers. In fact, Four Loko was so popular that the brand itself suffered from genericization, where all caffeinated malt liquors were colloquially referred to as Four Loko