Heat Pumps have a branding problem, but ACs don't

I'm not sure that it's rebranding that's going to help. The article does acknowledge that fairly cheap and natural gas and other fuels are one of the reasons why heat pumps or ACs with reversing valves aren't as popular. It does gloss over that in a fairly significant portion of the country heat pumps don't work that well and while there are newer refrigerants that do allow them to work better than they have in the past a lot of opinions have been made because people have seen heat pumps from the '70s and '80s that are quite lacking but still were sold in some of these northern states.

Even with modern heat pumps when you hit northern states you're not even going to match the cost of natural gas or propane. Because electricity prices are rising faster than natural gas and propane. This is because our electrical grid is ill-equipped to handle a completely electric infrastructure. So costs go up to build it out. Whereas the capacity for natural gas is much higher than current demand. Additionally natural gas can still operate during ice storms where power lines are down. This is a very real concern in Northern latitudes. You don't hear people whine as much like you did in Texas when it was barely below freezing and people didn't have a blanket for some reason but in northern latitudes ice storms can take down power lines for days at a time. If you live in the country it could be weeks. Having access to natural gas or propane as your heat source allows you to have heat even without power. It's not going to be your central HVAC system but you'll have something.

Also in the cost perspective, this costs more, because even if the heat pump energy usage was cost and neutral with a natural gas or propane for anywhere between two and six weeks out of the year they will need to be supplemental heat provided by electric resistive heating. This is of course during the coldest times when you're most likely to lose power.

Certainly Southern States where you have very few days below freezing heat pumps are excellent because even if you have power outages there are other ways to stay warm that don't involve supplemental heat sources. Blankets are a thing hopefully everyone has a supply of blankets in their house because these can be lifesavers when the temperature drops. I currently live in Alabama and having all electric house and even last year it got cold enough where my heat pump was not sufficient to keep the house at a comfortable temperature and for a few days I needed to use the electric resistive heating.

Perhaps if the United States had smaller houses and were less reliant on Central HVAC systems this could make a meaningful difference in how we heat and cool our homes. Using mini splits with variable refrigerant flow would be great because then heat and cool demand can be done on a room by room basis. Unfortunately I think most people don't like the unsightly thing on the wall and in a multi-level home won't always have ceiling space to mount units. So even having these kind of systems would be relegated to large houses and placed in sparsely used rooms. My experience with those houses oftentimes they just have completely separate centralized systems.

So there is much work to be done to adopt heat pump technology widely and it's far beyond rebranding.