This article seems to be from a European / mild winters point of view, and mainly for people training?!

I live in Montreal and a winter bike is very much a thing. If not you have to prepare yours and spend much more time and money on maintenance.

And since lots of us here are using bikes through snow storms, slush, ice, salt, calcium, you can be assured that most of us will not use a fancy road bike for this.

I don’t even use my hybrid in winter and have a cheap mountain bike just for this. But I must admit that I use it less and less, not because of disc brakes, but because we have a bike share system that is now working year-round. So sometimes I just rent a bike and don’t have to bother with all the maintenance winter would be imposing on one of my own bikes.

Winter biking is America is subject moreso to lack of infrastructure and roadway prioritization for snow removal than it is from Zwift becoming popular. I doubt they have many customers in Oulu, for example.

What that article describes as a ‘winter bike’ seems like what I’ve traditionally used as a year-round commuter bike, and my only bike.

Edit to add: Mind you, I live in a sub-tropical climate, so a bit of torrential rain, and a bit of hail once in a blue moon, is the worst I can expect. Still, this article seems to have been written by one of the ‘licorice all-sorts crew’ as I call them, whom I’ve never understood (my younger brother is one of them, and he’s an insufferable dickhead), and ‘The Hardest Rider You Know’ is just the average daily bike commuter, imo.