I know a little about this area and there is certainly a movement (glacial) away from thinking that thinking uses symbols, distributed or not. The argument cannot be made in a popular science article and so such articles inevitably fall back on popular ideas of what thinking is. The alternatives: the embodied nature of reasoning is one direction and many talk of an "enacivist" approach. There are certainly some kinds of thinking that require symbols, but a surprisingly large and diverse range of intelligent behaviour can be done by just wiring stuff up. Interestingly, a significant amount seems amenable to a mechanism based on "glorified auto-complete" (cf Hinton) and I have written something on the sociological variant - something readable I hope - arxiv.org/abs/2402.08403