FWIW, my experience disagrees with this. I was overweight, started running (starting around 9mi/wk, when I got bored and stopped I was up around 24mi/wk), and started losing weight quickly, lost a ton of it over a year, after which I was at a very good weight for me. Now, as the piece touches on, that exercise did change my eating, but the outcome of that isn't clear to me -- I stopped eating/snacking for a few hours before a run so I wouldn't cramp. But I also started eating a lot more outside of those exercise windows, as running so much made me quite ravenous at times. Ate anything and everything I wanted and I just kept dropping weight as long as I kept running.
Haven't looked at the data cited in the article, but my guess is that these studies are looking mostly at what's often defined as "moderate" exercisers, that is, people who walk an hour every day or something similarly unintensive. Which is vastly better than nothing, but it isn't exactly a hard workout like what I was engaging in, and I wouldn't expect to drop much weight if that's all I was doing.
Haven't looked at the data cited in the article, but my guess is that these studies are looking mostly at what's often defined as "moderate" exercisers, that is, people who walk an hour every day or something similarly unintensive. Which is vastly better than nothing, but it isn't exactly a hard workout like what I was engaging in, and I wouldn't expect to drop much weight if that's all I was doing.