I agree that in many ways this has been blown out of proportion. However I do think that there is value in this article reminding people that you don´t strictly own the money on sites such as Coinbase. Mostly I think that some people live under the impression that sites like Coinbase etc are similar to a bank in sense that yes - Coinbase and bank could go under, but it´s purely theoretical.
As far as bankruptcy proceedings are concerned, crypto exchanges are not treated in the same way as banks. Banks are usually in the "too big to fail" category and that owes to the fact that most people use banks. So the government would usually step in to save the banks from bankruptcy & liquidation as in the case of Fannie and Freddie.
But crypto exchanges are not put in that category so they are usually allowed to be liquidated. Partially because the emergance of so many scam exchanges made regulators turn their eyes away from the subject.