I would say it is more link-baity than misleading, Google did delist the smart thermostat maker Vivint, and they did buy the smart thermostat maker Nest. The article attempts to paint a picture of intrigue and conspiracy, but I suspect it was just bad SEO on their part, or even Counter-SEO at work by another of Vivint's competitors.
That said, three major things stand out, which are not link baity and really do indicate a problem.
First, Google is how people find things, that gives them extraordinary power to direct the market, and that power is operating completely unchecked.
Second, searching for Vivint, is what we at Blekko call a 'navigation search'. If you've typed in Vivint it is pretty clear the result you want, and in the article Google auto-corrects it away to vivino. Now I just typed vivint and it found it, but if Pando was accurate that a navlink wasn't found when they tried it, that would be a pretty egregious failure of a search engine, I could see 'smart thermostat' not listing them but not a search on their name.
And the final thing is of course the opacity of it all and the challenge of the algorithm. It really is a dead end until some sort of AI comes along, human curation did wonders for our index and Microsoft's. Google might do well to stop investing a billion dollars a quarter in acquiring traffic and instead spend that money making a cleaner index.