I've read this medium article, but I'm a bit confused about the second part (Funding & redeeming).

In the first part the author is doing everything right to keep everything on the offline laptop.
But then he suggests to copy the wallet.dat to an online computer?

For me this makes no sense. Why doing all those secure steps before to create a cold wallet and then just copy the wallet.dat to an online PC?
With this step the cold wallet instantly turn into a hot wallet. So what is the point here?
It does not matter for me, that the passphrase was never used so far.

In my understanding a cold wallet never touches a PC which is connected to any network.

I would only agree with the described way if the author would change one point and add one point.

1) The wallet.dat on the usb-drive should not be verified on any online PC. Only copy the wallet.dat on the online PC whenever you want to spend the coins.
2) Whenever you spend something from this wallet.dat, always spent EVERYTHING and then never use this wallet.dat again. Create a new one.